Quote

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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Dani Shapiro
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: April 10
Author
Novelist
New York City
New York
Mind
Tendencies
Remove
Minds
Hand
Duck
Moment
Slight
Keep
Ducks
Moments
Tendency
Hands
Wander

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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.
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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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Part of my spiritual work is learning to live with the knowledge that we can't protect our loved ones from pain and heartache.
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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?
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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.
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I could spend two years cross-legged on my floor and feel like I was working.
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There's something about urban life - you walk out your door, and you're in a steady of stream of life happening around you, and it's very easy to get caught up in that stream and simply kind of keep on moving.
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If there's anything weirder than an introverted writer going to lots of social functions, it's an introverted writer being converted into an accidental guru.
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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.
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Everything I know about life I learned from the daily practice of sitting down to write.
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Our pain is a part of who we authentically are.
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You can start your day over anytime.
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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.
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We don't choose what's going to wake us up.
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Traces that live within us often lead us to our stories
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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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If you are a writer or any kind of artist, if you change something as fundamental as where you live - the way you live - then I think you change the very instrument that is trying to make the art
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We are tyrannized by our options.
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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.
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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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