Duchess Goldblatt Quotes

If you’ve ever wondered what the right thing is to say to someone who’s grieving a death, I think this is it: Tell me all about your dear one.

If you’ve ever wondered what the right thing is to say to someone who’s grieving a death, I think this is it: Tell me all about your dear one.

Any asshole can make a mean joke. It’s harder work to reach out further for the joke that’s funny and can’t hurt anybody.

Sometimes I tie your words in linen with a little lavender and mint and use them as a poultice for my weary old heart.

Close your eyes and visualize the best possible outcome. When it’s not looking, grasp it by the neck and fling it into reality.

Choices are a luxury. We forget that sometimes, don't we? Not everybody gets to have choices.

When someone you love dies, you lose them in pieces over time, but you also get them back in pieces: little fragments of memory come rushing back through what they cared about, what brought them joy. If you’re lucky, you get little pieces back for the rest of your life.

If you have the education, wits, and leisure time to pursue your own interests, you have it better than 99% of the people who ever lived.

Wherever there’s organic matter, a water source, and darkness, reality will grow. Get after it with vinegar, baking soda, and dynamite.

Duchess Goldblatt’s Writing Advice: Use all the letters, not just vowels. Spread them around the page until you get the look you want.

After a certain point, people lose patience with your grief. They just want you to move on.

My father used to try to tell me to never say anything about anyone that I wouldn’t want them to overhear. “It will make you boring in conversation sometimes,” he said. “Maybe you know something private about someone that’s embarrassing and you could say it at a party, make everybody laugh. You’ll have to hold yourself back from doing it. Give up the fun of getting that laughter for yourself. But if you believe that you’re called to never cause pain to another human being, it won’t be a hard choice.

There’s my Duchess. Before I go, I’m going to tell you something about trust. It goes like this: It’s best if you decide to be true to the relationship rather than being true to the person. Because when the person lets you down (and he/she will!), you’ll say to yourself, “All bets are off!” And you’ll feel free to break a trust or breach privacy or be disloyal in big or small ways. It’s a justification. If you commit to the relationship, you’re being faithful to that. Same with friendship. That’s what I endeavor to do.—PJ

Don’t let anyone shame you for your love of an imaginary friend. Religions have been founded on less.

I paid extra for a phone with regressions instead of updates. It prompts me to return to myself as of this morning, last week, 1986

Not until people start seeing typos eating out of their garbage cans at night will they regret hunting proofreaders almost to extinction.

You’re not that special. Everybody suffers.” “Then what’s all this for?” “For? There is no for. It just is. I don’t think you need to try to assign some deeper reason to it. Suffering is part of life.” “So you’re saying it’s inescapable.” “No, I think I’m trying to say that escape shouldn’t be the primary goal. The goal is that you accept that suffering is part of life and use your suffering to grow in wisdom and depth.

I keep a silver bowl full of emails by the front door. Anyone who tries to pop in for a visit has to take a bag of them for the ride home.

There must be a contract between us, storyteller and listener: I will do the work of telling the tale as long as you do the work of believing in it.

Just when you think you can’t expect less, you have to learn again to expect less.

My soul and your soul can talk to each other,” he said. “As long as we tell the truth of our hearts, even when you’re in heaven, we’ll talk.

At what moment is a friendship conceived? When does it become a viable form of life?

Writers can be a lot of fun at parties, but word to the wise: Keep an eye on your good memories. They’ll strip them down for parts.

I spilled a bag of ellipses all over the floor. Now I don’t know where anything begins or ends.

When I edit, I remove the words that don’t want to be there, hand wash them in warm water, and lay them flat to dry. I might use them later.

When people focus intently only on feeling better, they reach for distractions. Overeating, overmedicating, abusing alcohol and drugs, self-harm: all of these self-destructive behaviors are designed to distract.

When we rely on self-deprecating humor, we’re trying to neutralize criticism preemptively, and there are echoes of ancient superstitions. I will deny my own gifts so that the gods don’t punish me and take them away.

Incorrect,” I said. “The saints are saints, by definition. Have you ever heard of Saint Drogo? One of my favorites. Patron saint of mute people, the mentally ill, and coffee. If that’s not a power triumvirate, then I don’t know what is.

I understand exactly what you’re saying,” I’d say. “I understand you have strong feelings, and I can see why. You’re entitled to have your feelings. Your heart belongs to you. Nobody else gets to decide who lives inside your heart. You choose who you want to love.” It’s amazing how simple truths resonate with small children.

She answered every comment people made, and I had a couple of rules: I pushed myself to use every opportunity to respond as a chance to create an inevitable surprise for the reader: “inevitable” in the sense that once you saw it, there was no other response that would have been superior, and a “surprise” in that people couldn’t guess what she would say next. I tried to build in surprises around every corner.

knew exactly what he was asking. He wanted me to do what he had always done: love the people we had been given, and not just my brother, but the rest of the family of origin. Love them with no hope of reward, recognize that they are inherently worthy of love, accept that they’re ours whether we like it or not; love them for whatever they are, forgive them for whatever they are not. Keep them alive. Keep them going. He wanted me

You ever see two little kids running around together? They’re only aware of extracting the greatest possible fun out of that moment

Tonight in Crooked Path, we’ll all visit our dear ones’ graves and lay wreaths made of apostrophes: the symbol of something missing.

When someone you love dies, you lose them in pieces over time, but you also get them back in pieces: little fragments of memory come rushing back through what they cared about, what brought them joy. If you’re lucky, you get little pieces back for the rest of your life. Some loves you don’t recover from.

Lots of people lose lifelong friends, lose their families, their husbands, their jobs, their money, their homes, their footing, their sense of self, their place in the world. They don’t go running around town sprouting extra personalities. I wouldn’t argue with you. I don’t know why it was. All I can tell you is that in my heart, in my mind, in my spirit: I broke. I broke into pieces. There are only tiny shards left now, a mosaic almost pretty if the pattern weren’t so irregular, in place of what was whole.

I remember how often I kept thinking, I want to go home, but then I’d remember there was no home anymore. I had a roof overhead but no soft place to land, and no one anywhere who had to let me in. I could retreat only into my own mind for relief

When I was young, I knew something was off, but I wasn’t sure what it was, so I tried to mimic and repeat what I thought I saw in other people’s families. This is a common mistake made by children who grow up amidst mental illness and addiction; they have to guess at how to pass for normal, and that pretense will always fall away sooner or later.

Funny ideas are everywhere if you’re vigilant and always on the lookout,

Sometimes it’s hard for me to fall asleep at night because I know I’ll miss myself when I’m gone.

If I make a joke at another person’s expense, even a gentle joke, even if the person is beyond the reach of my voice and will never know it or be hurt by it: it diminishes my listener to hear it; it diminishes me to tell it. The better joke is always going to be the one that doesn’t hurt anybody.

It’s best if you decide to be true to the relationship rather than being true to the person. Because when the person lets you down (and he/she will!), you’ll say to yourself, “All bets are off!” And you’ll feel free to break a trust or breach privacy or be disloyal in big or small ways. It’s a justification. If you commit to the relationship, you’re being faithful to that. Same with friendship. That’s what I endeavor to do.

What an unimaginable intimacy it would be to be welcome to walk into someone else’s home without knocking.

A voice came back to me on the street; I’d call it a voice, but there was no noise. It was more like an idea generated externally that made itself manifest to me. It was that confidence, that grace, that I’ve since come to know so well; it was Wallace Stevens’s idea of poetry, what he called “sounds passing through sudden rightnesses.

With all the great gifts you’ve been given in life, can’t you find compassion in your heart for people who have been given less?” he used to say to me.

But sometimes in cutting for space, I could find a better way to recast a sentence. Working within that constraint, maintaining meaning and nuance in less space, was one of my favorite things.

The human mind is kind. It will create blank spaces for itself. I think of them as little airbags in my mind, cushioning the tender places where the blows and bruises are.

And some of my favorite people have been alcoholics, but the disease turns a lot of people into liars. If you’re an addict, and you tell the truth about what’s happening to you, people will try to get you to stop, and the disease won’t allow you to stop.

The library textbook said that it was not uncommon for some parents, acting out of fear and love and confusion, to go to great lengths to keep an impaired young person comfortable and safe from himself. If he developed a delusional fear of stairs, for example, the family would come around to his point of view: they’d decide his concerns were perfectly reasonable, and they’d help him move his bed downstairs into the dining room. That’s our family to a T, I thought. Anything to keep him calm. We would have let him burn the whole house down around us if he decided he needed to.

Not until people start seeing typos eating out of their garbage cans at night will they regret hunting proofreaders almost to extinction.

But you can’t love your enemies,” I said. “It doesn’t make sense. If you loved them, they wouldn’t be your enemies.” “That’s the point, honey.” “Nobody can do that. It’s impossible. The best you can do is just put up with them.

Some people are monsters. There are people in the world who do not have your best interests at heart. Not everybody will be loving and loyal to you. But you know what? He’d learned that, already, the hard way, at four years old. He didn’t need me to reinforce it. He needed me to point him toward the light.

I understood intuitively as a small child that my voice was a gift—not a gift in the sense of a talent, but a gift because it was divinely given, just like anybody else’s: the voice is the mingling of the soul, the mind, and the body together, expressed through breath, which is life itself; how could any human voice not be sacred? I saw clearly that no one could demand a share of it. It was absolutely mine.

Close your eyes and visualize the best possible outcome. When it’s not looking, grasp it by the neck and fling it into reality. The

I think you need more medication,” he said. “Oh, there’s no question,” I said. “Trouble is they don’t make enough.

The library textbook said that it was not uncommon for some parents, acting out of fear and love and confusion, to go to great lengths to keep an impaired young person comfortable and safe from himself. If he developed a delusional fear of stairs, for example, the family would come around to his point of view: they’d decide his concerns were perfectly reasonable, and they’d help him move his bed downstairs into the dining room. That’s our family to a T, I thought. Anything to keep him calm. We would have let him burn the whole house down around us if he decided he needed to. (The question stands: Does the family of origin remain relevant forever? Maybe. I once stood still and watched as a snowball packed with ice flew down the street toward me, closer and closer, until it socked me right in the face. I’d had plenty of time to move out of the way; I saw in advance it was going to hit me. I stood still and let it. The young man who’d playfully thrown it at my head ran up to me and held his scarf up to my bleeding face. “Why didn’t you move out of the way, you goof ?” he asked, and I couldn’t make him understand: it would never have occurred to me that moving would help. I couldn’t stop a snowball from hitting me if it was meant to. I will admit to you now that it’s possible Faulkner was right. The past isn’t over.)

I cast my inner light out into the universe, more light would bounce back toward me.

Choices are a luxury. We forget that sometimes, don’t we? Not everybody gets to have choices.

I’m not competitive, which I used to flatter myself was a sign of maturity, but I realized a few years ago it could also be arrogance. I just don’t care enough about what other people are doing to compete with them. I see myself not in competition with anybody but in partnership with the page itself. It’s the beauty of the work that interests me, even if, like Duchess Goldblatt, like a Tibetan monk’s sand painting, it’s ephemeral. I will make it as perfect as I can while I work on it, and it will not hurt my heart when the wind sweeps it all away.

Men can be careless, not women. Women have to hold the world steady, or the whole operation will spin right off its axis.

The only way to be reliably sure the hero gets the girl at the end of the story is to be both the hero and the girl yourself. I

A lot of people go very Martha Graham when dancing on their enemies’ graves. Me, I like flamenco. I want the souls of the dead to feel it.

I want an inscription that means something to me,' I added. 'Of course.' He held his pencil and waited. 'Feasting on the carcasses of my enemies.' The old jeweler glanced up at me over his half-glasses. 'We're going to need a bigger ring.

I want an inscription that means something to me,' I added. 'Of course.' He held his pencil and waited. 'Feasting on the carcasses of my enemies.' The old jeweler glanced up at me over his half-glasses. 'We're going to need a bigger ring.

I want an inscription that means something to me," I added. "Of course." He held his pencil and waited. "Feasting on the carcasses of my enemies." The old jeweler glanced up at me over his half-glasses. "We're going to need a bigger ring.

I want an inscription that means something to me," I added. "Of course." He held his pencil and waited. "Feasting on the carcasses of my enemies." The old jeweler glanced up at me over his half-glasses. "We're going to need a bigger ring.

I don't mind an unreliable narrator, as long as she's punctual.

It's such a beautiful night. I think I'll catch up on reading your diaries. I'll use Track Changes so you can see where you went wrong.