Top 150 Dani Shapiro Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You can start your day over anytime.”

— Dani Shapiro

2. “Courage is more important than confidence.”

— Dani Shapiro

3. “From spiritual connection springs kindness, connection, social activism, and love.”

— Dani Shapiro

4. “From Carl Jung: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.”

— Dani Shapiro

5. “But gratitude and trauma weren’t mutually exclusive.”

— Dani Shapiro

6. “Confidence is highly overrated when it comes to creating literature. A writer who is overly confident will not engage in the struggle to get it exactly right on the page – but rather, will assume that she’s getting it right without the struggle.”

— Dani Shapiro

7. “We can’t protect ourselves from pain and heartache. In fact, to love – fully, madly, deeply – is the ensure heartache some day.”

— Dani Shapiro

8. “Our teachers are everywhere. Our teachers are right in front of us, and take so many forms. All we need to do is to open our eyes, to be open to and aware of the possibilities. Otherwise, we walk sightless among miracles.”

— Dani Shapiro

9. “Everything you need to know about life can be learned from a genuine and ongoing attempt to write.”

— Dani Shapiro

10. “I don’t want to lean back into the past, or forward into the future. I don’t want to wish the present moment away.”

— Dani Shapiro

11. “In a creative journey, it is essential, no matter how far one runs, to examine that which is closest to home.”

— Dani Shapiro

12. “There are books that a writer undertakes because she wants to go on a journey, and there are journeys a writer undertakes because she wants to write a book.”

— Dani Shapiro

13. “In my life as a wife and mother, I’m always conscious of my desire to be present.”

— Dani Shapiro

14. “Part of my spiritual work is learning to live with the knowledge that we can’t protect our loved ones from pain and heartache.”

— Dani Shapiro

15. “You know,” my aunt says, “I once had a terribly difficult period that lasted twenty-four years.” Wait. Twenty-four years? “And it was so important to realize that I didn’t know what was on the other side of the darkness. Every so often there was a sliver of light that shot the whole world through with mystery and wonder, and reminded me: I didn’t have all the information.” –.”

— Dani Shapiro

16. “I’ve always felt like my nose is pressed to glass. I always feel a little bit like an outsider.”

— Dani Shapiro

17. “Writing has been my window-flung wide open to this magnificent, chaotic existence-my way of interpreting everything within my grasp.”

— Dani Shapiro

18. “Traces that live within us often lead us to our stories.”

— Dani Shapiro

19. “I’m very disciplined, but the one thing that I have addictive behavior about is the Internet.”

— Dani Shapiro

20. “But I think that at the moment of my death, I’d like to be looking at those pictures of everyone I have ever loved.”

— Dani Shapiro

21. “Devotion, as it relates to the title of my memoir, means fidelity – as in fidelity to a person or a practice. I think it’s certainly possible to feel devotion without having faith, at least in the religious sense of the word.”

— Dani Shapiro

22. “I found myself doing so much public speaking, more and more and bigger and bigger.”

— Dani Shapiro

23. “I’ve certainly faced some raw, real pain in my life. I lost my father to a car accident when I was young. My mother died ten years ago. My son was very sick as an infant. Eventually, I have attempted to transform this pain into art, to make meaning out of it.”

— Dani Shapiro

24. “There’s something about urban life – you walk out your door, and you’re in a steady of stream of life happening around you, and it’s very easy to get caught up in that stream and simply kind of keep on moving.”

— Dani Shapiro

25. “The constitutional disease from which I suffer,” wrote the philosopher and psychologist William James, “is what the Germans call Zerrissenheit, or torn-to-pieces-hood. The days are broken in pure zig-zag and interruption.”

— Dani Shapiro

26. “If I dismiss the ordinary – waiting for the special, the extreme, the extraordinary to happen – I may just miss my life.”

— Dani Shapiro

27. “There is no end to the promotion. There is no end to the possibilities. You can continue to promote a book for years, literally.”

— Dani Shapiro

28. “We don’t choose what’s going to wake us up.”

— Dani Shapiro

29. “It is in the thousands of days of trying, failing, sitting, thinking, resisting, dreaming, raveling, unraveling that we are at our most engaged, alert, and alive.”

— Dani Shapiro

30. “The fact is that most husbands, regardless of religion – it’s an old-fashioned gender divide where the husband wants to stay home and the wife is the one who drags herself and her children to whatever spiritual center they’re going to.”

— Dani Shapiro

31. “Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment. Each member of a couple is separate; the two come together in double attention. Lovemaking is not a third thing but two-in-one. John Keats can be a third thing, or the Boston Symphony Orchestra, or Dutch interiors, or Monopoly.”

— Dani Shapiro

32. “I don’t want to be a presentist,” the author was saying. Presentism: the anachronistic introduction of present-day ideas and perspectives into depictions or interpretations of the past.”

— Dani Shapiro

33. “The truth is in the present moment.”

— Dani Shapiro

34. “Our shared vocabulary – our own language – will die with us. We are the treasure itself: fathoms deep, in the world we have made and made again.”

— Dani Shapiro

35. “It is only with distance that we are able to turn our powers of observation on ourselves, thus fashioning stories in which we are characters.”

— Dani Shapiro

36. “Recognize the possibility of the divine in any given moment.”

— Dani Shapiro

37. “I used to act in television commercials when I was a kid and a young adult.”

— Dani Shapiro

38. “If you write memoir, it can’t be about blame or hurt; it has to be creative.”

— Dani Shapiro

39. “Strange – I’m not much of a film person. I love watching films, but they don’t stay with me the way books do. Stranger still, because my husband is a screenwriter!”

— Dani Shapiro

40. “Bessel van der Kolk: “The nature of trauma is that you have no recollection of it as a story.”

— Dani Shapiro

41. “All there is to do, right at this very moment, is to breathe in, breathe out, and kiss the joy as it flies.”

— Dani Shapiro

42. “My journals were a clearing house – a garbage can. Once I was writing seriously, I understood that this was the stuff that didn’t belong in my work.”

— Dani Shapiro

43. “Years vanish. Months collapse. Time is like a tall building made of playing cards. It seems orderly until a strong gust of wind comes along and blows the whole thing skyward. Imagine it: an entire deck of cards soaring like a flock of birds.”

— Dani Shapiro

44. “Maggie Shipstead takes hold of the reader and doesn’t let go. Astonish Me is a haunting, powerful novel.”

— Dani Shapiro

45. “We don’t ruminate during a fight. Maybe in a bath, or driving a car, or as we take a walk. But not right smack in the middle of a dramatic moment.”

— Dani Shapiro

46. “It’s easier in an urban world to cast the blame outward. So I’ve learned a lot about my own process in that way.”

— Dani Shapiro

47. “I never troll for material. It simply presents itself, and is always unmistakable. This is why I want to roll my eyes when people interrupt themselves in the middle of some story they’re telling me to say, “You know you can’t write about this.””

— Dani Shapiro

48. “Logic and faith don’t occupy the same side.”

— Dani Shapiro

49. “My parents made the decision never to focus on my looks, and I had no sense of myself as beautiful.”

— Dani Shapiro

50. “If you are a writer or any kind of artist, if you change something as fundamental as where you live – the way you live – then I think you change the very instrument that is trying to make the art.”

— Dani Shapiro