Pat Schneider Quotes

I learned without her saying a word that there are truly many ways to pray, and lighting a candle is one of them.

It is a kind of love, is it not? How the cup holds the tea, How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare, How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes Or toes. How soles of feet know Where they're supposed to be. I've been thinking about the patience Of ordinary things, how clothes Wait respectfully in closets And soap dries quietly in the dish, And towels drink the wet From the skin of the back. And the lovely repetition of stairs. And what is more generous than a window?

Be led by your joy.

What a pity. How the stars and seas and rivers in their fragile lace of fog go on without us morning after morning, year after year. And we disappear.

Putting words onto paper—when it is done as an honest act of search or connection, rather than as an act of manipulation, performance, self-aggrandizement or self-protection—is a holy act.

Writing and prayer are both a form of love, and love takes courage.

Both writing and praying are acts of deep vulnerability.

If I am an artist, I have a vocation. As one drawn to a lover or called to a religious mission, I go to my work—my writing—because it is essential to my happiness.

The more we open ourselves to love, the larger our capacity for love becomes.

I go fishing in my mind. I put out bait, the bait of my own longing, my desire, and my hunger for connection, for a tug of something alive at the end of a line. Something that I may have to struggle with to pull in, but that will be wild and important to me, whether I keep it or let it go.

It occurred to me that when I begin to write, I open myself and wait. And when I turn toward an inner spiritual awareness, I open myself and wait.

God’s love is God’s attention.

Jesus said, “But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret.

Surprise is a major factor in distinguishing an answer to prayer from a projection of my own mental processes. When I can’t believe I made up the answer myself, I have to look around to see where it came from.

I am like you, curious and small. Like you, I pause alertly and open my senses to try to read the air, the clouds, the sun’s slant, the little movements of the animals, all in the hope I will learn the secret of whether I am loved.”5

Writing is an animal that lives in the soul. It must not be whipped into doing tricks. It is not a circus animal. It can be fierce, but it is not malevolent. It can be playful, but it is not without wisdom. Above all, it is wild. A wild animal has to sleep sometimes. This is a time of deep sleep for my writing.

To pray is to open oneself completely, intimately, into the Presence that is beyond our ability to name.

Maybe the bottom of my own night is a darkness I cannot descend into without “the light that is within me” becoming dark.

Darkness and light are inextricably bound together.

In writing, we see, sometimes with fear and trembling, who we have been, who we really are, and we glimpse now and then who we might become.

Follow, poet, follow right to the bottom of the night. I have no choice but to pursue the deepest truth my life has given me.

But if you worry about other people as you write a first draft, you will not be able to free your unconscious mind to give up its treasures. It will be bound by the great dogs of your fear,

The panther that has stalked you since you were a child is old now. No longer wild, and tired of guarding the treasure you yourself left behind - blind and deaf, she will give it all to you if you just let her go.

The self you leave behind is only a skin you have outgrown. Don't grieve for it. Look to the wet, raw, unfinished self, the one you are becoming. The world, too, sheds its skin: politicians, cataclysms, ordinary days.

She begins, “What is the question we spend our entire lives asking?” and answers, “Our question is this: Are we loved? I don’t mean by one another.” She closes her sermon to the snakes with these words: “I am like you, curious and small. Like you, I pause alertly and open my senses to try to read the air, the clouds, the sun’s slant, the little movements of the animals, all in the hope I will learn the secret of whether I am loved.

Martha Graham, speaking to dancers, could have been speaking to any artist, any writer: There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening which is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist.

If we can't forget, how can we forgive? I believe that forgiving can't be done by willpower alone. I can will myself to write out my own memories and feelings. I can will myself to imagine onto the page how someone else may have felt. I can will myself to research someone else's life in order to better understand what happened. But I don't think I can forgive by simply willing to forgive. Forgiving happens to us when our hearts are ready. Sometimes it takes the form of working on our own story until quietly, often surprisingly, we simply let go of the hurt. Sometimes forgiving makes it possible to pick up the pieces of a broken relationship and begin again. Sometimes it means letting a relationship go. We can't forgive through willpower. What we can do is work toward readiness of heart. Writing as a spiritual practice can be that kind of work. When our heart is ready, we often don't even know it until forgiveness happens within us. It is a gift.

There are cultural and societal prejudices that make it hard for us to write. It has been my experience that for some men, the struggle to write involves the prejudice that it is not “manly” to reveal the inner life, the secrets of the heart and of the imagination. For many women, the struggle to write is at base a struggle against the idea that women’s lives are not of interest as literature. I have a friend whose husband once said after her first book had been published, “You sit there writing as if your life had some significance.

There is a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen about a soldier who is going through a forest. He meets an old woman who gives him a magic apron and sends him down into a deep shaft. He finds rooms of treasure as he goes deeper and deeper—each treasure greater than the last and each treasure guarded by a terrifying dog, each dog with larger eyes. The first one has eyes as big as saucers; the last one has eyes as big as wagon wheels. He does as the old woman told him: spreads out the apron, picks up each dog and puts it on the apron, and this makes him safe. In the first room he finds copper and fills his pockets. In the second room he finds silver and has to empty his pockets of copper to make room for silver. In the third room he finds gold and has to throw away the silver in order to gather the greater treasure. This tale is a metaphor for the process of making art. There is danger in going down into the unknown. What we will find there, in the unconscious where creation happens, may call for all our skill, all our intuition. It may change us; it may redefine our lives. But I believe we have no other choice if we are to be artist/writers. The act of writing is a tremendous adventure into the unknown, always fraught with danger. But the deeper you go and the longer you work at your art, the greater will be your treasure.

My continuing passion is to part a curtain, that invisible shadow that falls between people, the veil of indifference to each other’s presence, each other’s wonder, each other’s human plight. Eudora Welty

That first voice, the voice of home, is the one the writer must protect from the contempt or disdain or disregard of any critic, no matter how famous or capable that critic may be. It is not all that a mature writer needs; surely every writer needs the tools of literary criticism and as much knowledge of various traditions as possible—but a profound acceptance of and trust in one’s own voice is the first and most important thing the writer needs.

are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground

American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them, we die long before women do with our hearts exploding or our blood pressure rising or our lives eaten away by alcohol because that lake of grief inside us has no outlet. We, men, die because our faces were not watered enough.8

PERHAPS Perhaps the world ends here. —JOY HARJO You have undone the weave of the garment the old ghost habitually wore, the ghost who forever meets you inside the tenement door. She is naked now, and so thin you can’t see her anymore. But ghosts don’t have to be visible for you to know they are there. She never stands at the table or sits down in a chair. She is naked, and cold as a shiver under her long, grey hair. In dreams you’ve unwoven her garments and set fire to the tenement wall. Nothing is left of the building – a tumble of ashes is all. You can’t see her in that absence. In the silence, you can’t hear her call. The world begins at a table, says the poet. The world ends there, too. And the ghost you try to dismantle clothes herself in you. Then her silence speaks only to silence, and there’s nothing more you can do. You have railed at the fetters that bind you; you have asked the inevitable “Why?” You have stripped her of clothing and lodging— what else can you possibly try? If you kill the ghost of your childhood, It is you who will certainly die.

Something in me that was broken, cracked—becomes whole. The cracks, if I write them with utter honesty, are where “the light gets in.” The present meets the past, and healing begins.

If, however, we take the story as a metaphor for the journey of the writer/artist, perhaps it is telling us that a time comes when we must take what we have learned, but go on without our parents, our teachers, our mentors, those who first showed us the way. We must go beyond at least some of our companions. And that necessary individuation—that breaking free—is sometimes very hard, sometimes even psychologically violent.

There is a last word to be said about the fairy tale. The old woman sends the soldier down into the deep darkness, promising him treasure, but telling him to bring back to her just one thing: an old tinder box. He succeeds, but instead of giving it to her, he kills the old woman and goes off to have his own adventures with the box and the magical genie inside. This is a complicated ending, but worth pondering.

I have come to understand, through my own writing and through working with other writers, that fear is a friend of the writer. Where there is fear, there is buried treasure. Something important lies hidden—something that matters—like the angel waiting in the stone that Michelangelo began to carve.

Abandonment is a necessary task of the writer. As we grow in our art, our art changes, and we must move on. One of the most generous spirits in twentieth-century literature was William Stafford. He said the writer’s job is to abandon his or her work, to allow others to make judgment of its worth, and to go on to the next poem, the next story. All of us have habits of thought. Often for writers they include formulas of disbelief in our own gifts. If we cannot let go of the familiar old habits, we will not grow as artists. To grow as a writer, we must open our hearts, grow in our capacity to learn, and deepen our courage. There is an ancient promise: “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” Even those truths that are painful will ultimately increase my wisdom, undergird my strength, make possible my art.

It is a kind of love, is it not? How the cup holds the tea, How the chair stands sturdily and foursquare, How the floor received the bottoms of shoes or toes.

Maybe she is right. Maybe the old self has to die for the new self to be born. Or maybe, for me, the old self doesn’t have to die. Maybe who I have been is not erasable on the tablet of who I am, or in the book of who I will become. Maybe writing, like painting, can be pentimento—one layer over another, the early layers now and then showing through.

Writing is often a struggle between the personal and the universal, and the way writers deal with that struggle varies.

The issue for me, both as a writer and as a spiritual seeker, is courage—the courage to be there myself, and the courage to allow the reader to be there—to see, to touch, to taste, to smell,

human suffering is the price we pay for freedom—our own, and the freedom of others. We are free to make mistakes, free to be cruel or kind, free to hurt or help one another. We are free in a dangerous world;

It is what we love the most / can make us most afraid

American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them, we die long before women do with our hearts exploding or our blood pressure rising or our lives eaten away by alcohol because that lake of grief inside us has no outlet. We, men, die because our faces were not watered enough.