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Devotion, as it relates to the title of my memoir, means fidelity - as in fidelity to a person or a practice. I think it's certainly possible to feel devotion without having faith, at least in the religious sense of the word.

Dani Shapiro

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Dani Shapiro
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: April 10
Author
Novelist
New York City
New York
Think
Means
Relate
Thinking
Sense
Certainly
Persons
Least
Relates
Person
Possible
Fidelity
Without
Practice
Memoir
Feel
Religious
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Faith
Devotion

More quotes by 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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I started realising that the themes running through all of my novels were really haunting and obsessing me about my own life.
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Confidence is highly overrated when it comes to creating literature. A writer who is overly confident will not engage in the struggle to get it exactly right on the page - but rather, will assume that she's getting it right without the struggle.
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I could spend two years cross-legged on my floor and feel like I was working.
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Maggie Shipstead takes hold of the reader and doesn't let go. Astonish Me is a haunting, powerful novel.
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Those memories that are engraved within me become teaching tools, ways of connecting with others, of creating an empathic bridge, of reaching out a hand and saying, I've been there, too.
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At some point each day (well, most days) I unroll my mat and practice for an hour. I sit in meditation for a while. This can be five minutes or twenty minutes, but the daily practice - simply showing up for it - is centering.
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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]
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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.
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There is no end to the promotion. There is no end to the possibilities. You can continue to promote a book for years, literally.
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I remember getting my first cell phone in New York, getting into a taxi and thinking This is the end of solitude in the back of a taxi. What used to happen in the back of a taxi? You looked out the window. My brain has become less able to spend lengths of time without shifting, and I worry about that.
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When I was writing my first novel, I smoked cigarettes. And when I think about what it was like to smoke, I remember exactly the feeling of sitting in front of my big old computer in that little room where I wrote my first novel.
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We can't protect ourselves from pain and heartache. In fact, to love - fully, madly, deeply - is the ensure heartache some day.
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I think there's something about a writer's disposition, that is, even if unaware, always slightly in a witness state.
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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.
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It is only with distance that we are able to turn our powers of observation on ourselves, thus fashioning stories in which we are characters.
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My journals were a clearing house - a garbage can. Once I was writing seriously, I understood that this was the stuff that didn't belong in my work.
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I'm an urban person who loves living in the country.
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I’ve discovered that my best work comes from the uncomfortable but fruitful feeling of not having a clue – of being worried, secretly afraid, even convinced that I’m on the wrong track.
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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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