Sublime

good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are.

Toni Morrison said, “The function of freedom is to free someone else,” and if you are no longer wracked or in bondage to a person or a way of life, tell your story. Risk freeing someone else.

Actually, pigeonholing is something people need to do in order to feel that they have set the chaos of existence into some kind of reassuring order.

Having come from nowhere, you will be more surely heading somewhere.

What I’ve learned to do when I sit down to work on a shitty first draft is to quiet the voices in my head.

no one is going to see it. Move on to first grade, to second, to third. Who were your teachers, your classmates? What did you wear? Who and what were you jealous of? Now branch out a little. Did your family take vacations

If you do stick with writing, you will get better and better, and you can start to learn the important lessons: who you really are, and how all of us can live in the face of death, and how important it is to pay much better attention to life, moment by moment, which is why you are here.

I imagine, in other words, that the notebook is about other people. But of course it is not. I have no real business with what one stranger said to another at the hatcheck counter in Pavillon; in fact I suspect that the line “That’s my old football number” touched not my own imagination at all, but merely some memory of something once read, probabl

She was so funny but so serene. Her mantra, which I now have tattooed on my body, is “Everyone does their best; some people’s best is shitty.”