Quote

What you fear your whole life comes to pass. You end up living toward it, you spend your life running from it but your foot is nailed to the sidewalk. You circle around it until you wear yourself own.

Nick Flynn

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Nick Flynn
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: January 26
Memoirist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
Writer
Scituate
Massachusetts
Running
Pass
Ends
Wear
Around
Toward
Whole
Spend
Nailed
Life
Feet
Sidewalk
Living
Circle
Fear
Foot
Comes
Circles

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There are many ways to drown, only the most obvious wave their arms as they're going under.
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I believe poetry has very little to do with memory.
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Certain stories we carry with us, events in our life, they define who we are. It's not a matter of getting over anything we have to make the best of it.
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By the time I'm nine I know the world is a dangerous place. I've heard whispers about razorblades in apples, about Charlie Manson and his family. But no one is offering any clear information.
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The attention one gets from being a poet isnt great.
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Alcohol is the river we sit on the banks of, contemplating. Sometimes we watch ourselves float past, sometimes we watch ourselves sink.
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inside us, a flower taken whole, a field built inside.
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Change is one of the only constants in Buddhism as meditation became the way I breathed in the days, this became apparent.
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Trinity Park lies directly across from the library, Trinity Church rising like a midieval thought amidst the glass and steel towers.
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Memoir is actually the most egoless genre, even though it might seem ostensibly so much ego-driven. In order for it to succeed, you have to dissolve the self into these larger universal truths, and explore these deeper mysteries. If it’s purely autobiographical and ego-driven, it’s going to fail.
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In life you get one take, and it's perfect. It's strange, afterwards you might think I shouldn't have reacted that way, but that's the way you reacted. That's your take that's all you get.
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We got him to talk to a psych doctor once, the doctor asked if he heard things other people don't. Sure, Paul answered, I hear birds in the morning when everyone's sleeping, I hear trees rustling when no one's around.
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I can weep pretty easily. I can get tears in my eyes from a beautiful work of art.
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Who doesn't want to just disappear, at some point in the day, in a year, to just step off the map and float?
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I get inspired by my friends, and if a friend is a writer, that is even deeper.
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In my experience, whatever happens clings to us like barnacles on the hull of a ship, slowing us slightly, both uglifying and giving us texture. You can scrape all you want, you can, if you have money, hire someone else to scrape, but the barnacles will come back or at least leave a blemish on the steel.
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If you're going to write about someone's life, you don't just use them for wallpaper. You have to honor and respect that life.
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Some part of me knew he would show up, that if I stood in one place long enough he would find me, like you're taught to do when you're lost. But they never taught us what to do if both of you are lost, and you both end up in the same place, waiting.
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I offer Emily half of my hit of acid- Love Saves the Day. It's my second or third time tripping, Emily's first, and she's understandably trepid. Awake all night, at one point I find her touching her reflection in a cruelly lit dorm bathroom, asking if she'll ever be the same. I kiss her then for the first time and whisper, No.
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There is a physics to the world, which non-fiction has a contract to stand in awe of, otherwise it becomes completely self-centered and ego-driven, which is the death of a memoir.
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