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Writing has been my window-flung wide open to this magnificent, chaotic existence-my way of interpreting everything within my grasp.

Dani Shapiro

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Dani Shapiro
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: April 10
Author
Novelist
New York City
New York
Open
Existence
Flung
Within
Interpreting
Everything
Chaotic
Writing
Grasp
Way
Magnificent
Wide
Window

More quotes by Dani Shapiro

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I do strongly identify with being Jewish. I was raised Orthodox and had a childhood complicated by the fact that my father was deeply religious and my mother was not.
Dani Shapiro
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When I started meditating, even doing yoga, I felt like it was hard to allow myself to develop any other kind of practice [outside of Judaism], like I was somehow being untrue to my heritage, and that was something I had to get over and was probably the greatest revelation to me.
Dani Shapiro
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The fact is that most husbands, regardless of religion - it's an old-fashioned gender divide where the husband wants to stay home and the wife is the one who drags herself and her children to whatever spiritual center they're going to.
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Michael Lowenthal has written a big-hearted and wise book about familial love in all its richness and complexity.
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I started realising that the themes running through all of my novels were really haunting and obsessing me about my own life.
Dani Shapiro
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Traces that live within us often lead us to our stories
Dani Shapiro
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What's more important that spiritual life? It seems to me it's the bedrock of everything essential about being human.
Dani Shapiro
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Our minds have a tendency to wander. To duck and feint and keep us at a slight remove from the moment at hand.
Dani Shapiro
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In a creative journey, it is essential, no matter how far one runs, to examine that which is closest to home.
Dani Shapiro
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Everything I know about life I learned from the daily practice of sitting down to write.
Dani Shapiro
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I do whatever is necessary in order to maintain the equanimity we all need to withstand the disappointment and rejection that are the lot of every writer, no matter where we are in our careers.
Dani Shapiro
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If I dismiss the ordinary—waiting for the special, the extreme, the extraordinary to happen - I may just miss my life.
Dani Shapiro
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I had spent my childhood and the better part of my early adulthood trying to understand my mother. She had been an extraordinarily difficult person, spiteful and full of rage, with a temper that could flare, seemingly out of nowhere, scorching everything and everyone who got in its way. [pp. 40-41]
Dani Shapiro
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You can start your day over anytime.
Dani Shapiro
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Music inspires me and puts me in the right mood, but to actually listen to it when I write - I find it gets in the way.
Dani Shapiro
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When a writer's whole being is poured into a piece of work, there is never enough. The feeling of finally getting to the end of a piece of work, of making it as good as you can at that moment, is more of a relief than anything else, and then you wait for reviews.
Dani Shapiro
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I was doing a lot of yoga and learning to meditate, and I found that extremely helpful, and still do and hopefully always will.
Dani Shapiro
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There’s a great expression in Twelve Step programs: Act as if. Act as if you’re a writer. Sit down and begin. Act as if you might just create something beautiful, and by beautiful I mean something authentic and universal. Don’t wait for anybody to tell you it’s okay. Take that shimmer and show us our humanity. That’s your job.
Dani Shapiro
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I was in my early thirties writing about my early twenties, so there was this way of seeing my younger self from enough of a distance to have perspective but also not to feel that I had to protect myself. My dreams for myself then would have undersold myself in a way.
Dani Shapiro
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I did want to feel like life's all of one piece.
Dani Shapiro