Gail Godwin Quotes

There are two kinds of people. One kind, you can just tell by looking at them at what point they congealed into their final selves. It might be a very nice self, but you know you can expect no more suprises from it. Whereas, the other kind keep moving, changing... They are fluid. They keep moving forward and making new trysts with life, and the motion of it keeps them young. In my opinion, they are the only people who are still alive. You must be constantly on your guard against congealing.

Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater.

How easy it was to make people happy, when you didn't want or need anything from them.

Lately she’d been listening to books on tapes, fat womanly novels as she thought of them. Maeve Binchy, Gail Godwin, Marian Keyes. Pat Conroy—

Casey recalled how Gail defended herself in the parking lot of the English & Philosophy Building from the unwanted attentions of a lecherous fellow student, who shall remain nameless. ‘Please leave me alone,’ Ms Godwin warned the offending student, ‘or I shall be forced to wound you with a weapon you can ill afford to be wounded by in a town this small.’ The threat was most mysterious, not to mention writerly, but the oafish lecher was not easily deterred. ‘And what might that weapon be, little lady?’ the lout allegedly asked. ‘Gossip,’ Gail Godwin replied.

After all the human noise and conflicts have stopped, the absent person has more room in your heart to spread out and be herself. My mother's been gone ten years and I know her much better now than when we saw each other every day.

because you’re a child and you have no way to compare your life to other people’s lives. Your foremost need is to stay safe within the only life you know.

I’m not sure I know what ‘simple-hearted’ means,” I said haughtily. “When there’s no deceit or malice in your heart. Most of us have some; it protects us. People without it are rare.

A person always has control over how she meets her adversities, and the good news is that the facing of them, one after another, year after year, builds an inner strength that nobody can take away from you.

There are things we can't undo, but perhaps there is a kind of constructive remorse that could transform regrettable acts into something of service to life.

The more you respect and focus on the singular and the strange, the more you become aware of the universal and infinite.

The future arches above us all like a giant question mark, looming or embracing by whims and turns.

May their having each other make more of them both.

The person in the song is really addressing a powerful and constant state of yearning more than he is any real lover. It's the state of this yearning that torments him, yet he also loves his torment. He needs it. Because he understands that being able to feel this yearning so exquisitely is his secret strength.

Yes, if you believed in words, if you lived by words, you had better be careful which words you say and how you say them. You had better be careful what you look up, which words, which names. Jane Clifford, in The Odd Woman

In friendships . . . the requisits are always the same. Each provides the other with a refuge in time of trouble, with a continuum to fall back on in time of self-doubt, with an underpinning of earned trust upon which it is possible to build new achievements.

But what we ought to fear is the kind of death that happens in life. It can happen at any time. You're going along, and then, at some point, you congeal. You know, like jelly. You're not fluid anymore. You solidify at a certain point and from then on your life is doomed to be a repetition of what you have done before.

The human mind, as we know from personal experience, is a chronic time traveler, but we are repeatedly amazed by its ability to hitch up the body, the body that resides the only place it can— in present time— and pull it along like a wagon, with its entire load of sensory equipment, backward or forward into other time zones.

If you are in difficulties with a book,” suggested H. G. Wells, “try the element of surprise: attack it at an hour when it isn’t expecting it.” This was one way Gail Godwin learned to outfox her “watcher” (the inner critic who kept an eye on her as she worked): looking for times to write when she was off guard. Other tactics Godwin found helpful included writing too fast and in unexpected places and times; working when tired; writing in purple ink on the back of charge card statements; and jotting down whatever came to mind while a tea kettle boiled, using its whistle as a deadline. “Deadlines are a great way to outdistance the watcher,” advised Godwin.

Remorse went out of fashion around the same time that “Stop feeling guilty,” and “You’re too hard on yourself,” and “You need to love yourself more” came into fashion.

During the act of writing I have told myself something that I didn't know I knew.

But the son whips out a Bayer aspirin, the father rises to his feet, embraces the son, and Technicolor is restored to their lives.

Nonie often remarked that every one of us needed to get away from other people and replenish our personal reserves.

Then he laughed, his typical laugh. Making me wish i had ten more such anectodes stashed away to keep him standing there, holding onto me and laughing.

Not everybody gets to grow up. First you have to survive your childhood, and then begins the hard work of growing into it.

It was more like I saw him coming and knew he was the one. I went out of myself to meet him and then couldn’t get back inside without bringing him with me.

As long as you can go on creating new roles for yourself, you are not vanquished.

When I was in seminary," Father Edward had told other guests around the table when he was purchasing his books, "my spiritual director told me not to read theology. 'Read novels,' he said, and I have.

The walk north was exactly the right distance to make me walk out of myself....If you walked out of yourself going north, what did you do on the return walk? Enjoyed my emptiness. Or sometimes just congratulated myself for escaping.

This week I’ve learned that when you really love someone, you come to accept everything about them, all the moments in their history that have made them into just what they are. And I can accept everything in your past, because it has made you you.

I contemplated how I was going to get through the rest of the day and felt the onset of a terror I thought I had outgrown. I hated it when these clusters started to form. One unwelcome subject sought out its counterparts—farewells, people leaving and never coming back, ambulances.... And then those counterparts attracted similar old hurts and horrors until you were trapped in the nucleus of the cluster. This cluster, I knew, was labeled LOSS in big black letters. I knew this much, thanks to therapy and training, but simply knowing it didn't protect you from reacting to it over and over again. Until one day you resolved to sit down in the middle of the nucleus, fold your arms, and invite the cluster to do its worst. And if you survived that, you could look around and see what was left in its absence.

How glibly and thoughtlessly that phrase ‘make us grow’ slides off our tongues. As if growth were always a happy, shapely matter: leaves unfurling, blossoms opening, hearts and minds joyously stretching toward more light. Whereas the fact of the matter was, when we asked for growth, we were asking for a mess. Exploding tempers, privately nursed little petri dishes of resentments, insecure stumblings into dangerous new places.

We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be. - May Sarton You see, I am a poet, and not quite right in the head, darling. It's only that. - Edna St. Vincent Millay We are slowed down sound and light waves, a walking bundle of frequencies tuned into the cosmos. We are souls dressed up in sacred biochemical garments and our bodies are the instruments through which our souls play their music. - Albert Einstein ————- Eventually soulmates meet, for they have the same hiding place. - Robert Brault Some things arrive on their own mysterious hour, on their own terms and not yours, to be seized or relinquished forever. - Gail Godwin Art makes us exercise the weakest muscle in the human body, the muscle of empathy. - Etgar Keret In the history of old Jewish literature there was never any basic difference between the poet and the prophet. Our ancient poetry often became law and a way of life. - Isaac Bashevis Singer ——————————————————————————— I am not belittling the brave pioneer men but the sunbonnet as well as the sombrero has helped to settle this glorious land of ours. - Edna Ferber You lose in the end unless you know how the wheel is fixed or can fix it yourself. - Edna Ferber What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine. - Susan Sontag ——————————————————————————— There comes a time when suddenly you realize that laughter is something you remember and that you were the one laughing. - Marlene Dietrich We work in the dark, We do what we can, We give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art. - Henry James

Other people don’t exist when you’re not with them.

the remembrance of them is grievous unto us; the burden of them is intolerable.

General Confession it had been watered down to we are truly sorry and we humbly repent.

If someone had really done you an ill turn and later came to you and said, “I am truly sorry,” would that mean as much to you as “the burden of it has been intolerable to me”?

After I woke from my dream within a dream, I clung to what you’d said in the dream about “reference auras.” It seemed to point to a way of trying to live with this unbearable absence. Once someone is in your reference aura, they stay there forever. Couldn’t forever include after death? I mean, if someone has died, they are still in your reference aura and so continue to grow in your heart like a living person. That little boy Ritchie was carrying in his arms was about a year old. “This is the way we do it,” Ritchie said in the dream, and perhaps this is the way to do it.

How would a person know that their father is the devil incarnate?” “You wouldn’t at the time. It would be later, when you were safe enough to look back. At the time all you would feel at first would be a misgiving, that something wasn’t as it should be. Later on, it may grow into a full-blown sense of wrong. But it’s a wrong you’re part of. You can’t do anything about it because you’re a child and you have no way to compare your life to other people’s lives. Your foremost need is to stay safe within the only life you know.

Discontent,” Father Maturin said, enunciating the word with a strange vigor and looking straight at Elizabeth, “may be God’s catapult, His way of saying: ‘Go and try yourself now.

One of the notebooks was for musings and pep talks. ... The other notebooks were for writing out the novel the way authors had done for centuries.

As a teacher, Kurt Vonnegut was easy, magnanimous. He didn't try to make his students into little Kurt Vonneguts. He respected material unlike his own and was startlingly humble about what he did. ("I write with a big black crayon," he would write to me later, "while you're more of an impressionist. I don't think you have it in you to be crude.") In his workshop sessions, things always seemed a little looser, a little kinder, a little funnier.

Squashed behind The Cloud of Unknowing we discovered a pocket-size spiral notebook with a day-by-day account of the time Justin had stayed with her and her husband after Tommy’s death. The writing was legible though it required effort (this was before she took her calligraphy course), but Justin was ecstatic and asked if he could have the little notebook. “This is my history,” he said. Later, after he had deciphered every last word: “Boy, was I loved.

She was her steady self again, the one about whom Nonie had said, "I admire that woman. Despite all her adversities, Beryl Jones manages to stay in control her days.

People commit thousands of small suicides every day that go unnoticed

How could you feel so bound up with the idea of what someone meant to you, yet feel no urge to get in touch with the real person?

What we feel compelled to do, whether it’s making art or giving your life to God, evolves out of the inner fabric of our lives, however disguised the patterns may be to us. The work, the vocation, is an attempt on the part of the would-be artist to fulfill in an inner way, in a symbolic way, what the outer world is failing to provide him with in the service of wholeness.

We could all do with some silence, just sitting back in a dark theater and watching humans living and working and discovering their affinities without any words.

Merry didn’t believe Feron had any idea of her homesickness. Now Ritchie was the complete opposite. He loved being away from home and at twelve was making plans for traveling the world. What made him different? Did people who weren’t homesick carry their home inside them? And then there were people who wanted to forget the home they came from. She knew Feron must be one of these.

These days won’t last forever. No days ever do, though sometimes it’s hard to convince oneself of that.

I realized that below all our mes that become known to others is a self that nobody else can ever fully know. No self can ever share its entire being with another self, no matter how much love there is between them.

She was the kind of woman who, once she had made up her mind to like somebody, even if it had been an impulsive decision, would invest that person with all sorts of interesting and romantic aspects rather than admit she had been wrong.

When people are sensitive, they can tell when they meet someone who is going to influence their lives.

There is a place in me I haven’t gone yet.

That's why I envy Justin here in no small way. Despite her unfortunate room, and all those milkmaids threatening to swallow her with their smiles ... she can start her life over and be anything she chooses to be. Nobody knows what she was like back in Fredericksburg. She has lost all the props that defined her. Nobody knows all the peculiarities and character traits of her forebears so they can pretend to recognize those traits in her. She's a clean slate. When she meets new people, or new challenges, she is free to respond to the unique demands of the moment. Whereas I often feel I have been playing the same part in a show that's been running too long.

All beautiful, dangerous idols fall, I thought, if you keep your eye on them long enough.

Maybe it's because I'm more confident of my own powers now, not so afraid of losing myself, of being molded by other people's needs of me, of being overwhelmed by them, that I can live in those strange, green days again and willingly be that girl.

What is memory but another narrative form?

We can’t be free until we can tell our story, and only by telling it convincingly can we each do our bit to help the world grow up.

There was a great deal of energy and contentment to be gotten simply from not living a lie.

Once you get yourself out of the way, you can see everything the way it is. Your self isn’t blocking the world from you, once you have sidestepped its shadow.

When Yeats was in Paris visiting Maud Gonne in 1909-- he was forty-four-- he wrote in his journal that he had just realized Maud 'never really understands my plans, or nature, or ideas.' Never really understands my plans! Or my nature! Or my ideas! Now, that's a lot for somebody you have been in love with for twenty years not to understand about you. Could you stay in love with someone for twenty years, when that person does not, or cannot, understand your plans, your nature, or your ideas? Of course you could. Particularly if you happened to be a poet.

During all my worrying about how and when and whether we’d ever get together again, I had neglected to imagine we might slip back together as naturally as a dislocated joint slipping back into place, followed by an ardor more straightforward than either of us had been capable of before.

When someone has enough money, logistics can be worked out in no time.

Let thy good spirit enter my heart and there be heard without utterance, and without the sound of words speak all truth.

If you are an artist, you learn how to trap the yearning and put it where you want it, put it where it goes. That’s the secret all true artists come to know.

There were only a few stories worth telling, which is why they needed to be told over and over again, until everyone recognized them as his own experience.