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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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Dani Shapiro
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: April 10
Author
Novelist
New York City
New York
Childhood
Religious
Identify
Fact
Orthodox
Father
Strongly
Facts
Jewish
Mother
Deeply
Complicated
Raised

More quotes by 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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As a fiction writer, that's been a preoccupation of mine: Can you really just close the door and leave the past back there behind you, or is the door going to blow open at some point?
Dani Shapiro
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I'm an urban person who loves living in the country.
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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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I never troll for material. It simply presents itself, and is always unmistakable. This is why I want to roll my eyes when people interrupt themselves in the middle of some story they're telling me to say, You know you can't write about this.
Dani Shapiro
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Courage is more important than confidence
Dani Shapiro
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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.
Dani Shapiro
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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.
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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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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Our pain is a part of who we authentically are.
Dani Shapiro
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I did want to feel like life's all of one piece.
Dani Shapiro
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Part of my spiritual work is learning to live with the knowledge that we can't protect our loved ones from pain and heartache.
Dani Shapiro
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Michael Lowenthal has written a big-hearted and wise book about familial love in all its richness and complexity.
Dani Shapiro
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When I near the end of a book, it feels as if the entire universe meets me more than halfway and supports me. The whole world seems to shimmer when I find the words. My mind quiets.
Dani Shapiro
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We don't choose what's going to wake us up.
Dani Shapiro
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Success is so fleeting, even if you get a good book deal or your book is a huge success, there's always the fear: What about the next one?
Dani Shapiro
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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.
Dani Shapiro
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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.
Dani Shapiro
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Everything I know about life I learned from the daily practice of sitting down to write.
Dani Shapiro