Top 150 Dani Shapiro Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “It is the nature of trauma that, when left untreated, it deepens over time.”

— Dani Shapiro

52. “If we grew up with nothing, we’re complicated with that. That’s the thing I keep hearing from people.”

— Dani Shapiro

53. “I do whatever is necessary in order to maintain the equanimity we all need to withstand the disappointment and rejection that are the lot of every writer, no matter where we are in our careers.”

— Dani Shapiro

54. “When I was growing up, I had no idea that I could possibly become a writer. I wrote endlessly in journals – a practice I maintained for a long time, well into the writing life I had no idea I could ever have.”

— Dani Shapiro

55. “I’m most connected to myself when I’m alone in a room, moving my hand across a page. That’s when I feel most like me.”

— Dani Shapiro

56. “Let the young soul look back upon its life and ask itself: what until now have you truly loved, what has raised up your soul, what ruled it and at the same time made it.”

— Dani Shapiro

57. “Music inspires me and puts me in the right mood, but to actually listen to it when I write – I find it gets in the way.”

— Dani Shapiro

58. “There is no permanent forgetting. Though the world of things is persuasive and distracting, the stories always come back, circled in neon. They are all the more alive for having been hidden.”

— Dani Shapiro

59. “What makes a person a person? What combination of memory, history, imagination, experience, subjectivity, genetic substance, and that ineffable thing called the soul makes us who we are?”

— Dani Shapiro

60. “For years we had the persistent sensation in our life and art – John Updike’s phrase – that we were just beginning.”

— Dani Shapiro

61. “Michael Lowenthal has written a big-hearted and wise book about familial love in all its richness and complexity.”

— Dani Shapiro

62. “When I near the end of a book, it feels as if the entire universe meets me more than halfway and supports me. The whole world seems to shimmer when I find the words. My mind quiets.”

— Dani Shapiro

63. “Throughout history, great philosophical minds have grappled with the nature of identity. What makes a person a person? What combination of memory, history, imagination, experience, subjectivity, genetic substance, and that ineffable thing called the soul makes us who we are? Is who we are the same as who we believe ourselves to be?”

— Dani Shapiro

64. “In every generation there is a vault-keeper, one who guards the links fiercely and knows they are more precious than rubies.”

— Dani Shapiro

65. “My desk is covered with talismans: pieces of rose quartz, wishing stones from a favorite beach.”

— Dani Shapiro

66. “Sometimes I think I have organized the inner crowd. For a brief, breathtaking moment, I feel completely whole. I understand that I am composed of many selves that make up a single chorus. To listen to the music this chorus makes, to recognize it as music, as something noble, varied, patterned, sublime – that is the work of a lifetime.”

— Dani Shapiro

67. “What’s more important that spiritual life? It seems to me it’s the bedrock of everything essential about being human.”

— Dani Shapiro

68. “You have to believe in yourself before the world has given you any indication that you should believe in yourself as a writer.”

— Dani Shapiro

69. “I think there’s something about a writer’s disposition, that is, even if unaware, always slightly in a witness state.”

— Dani Shapiro

70. “I’ve discovered that my best work comes from the uncomfortable but fruitful feeling of not having a clue – of being worried, secretly afraid, even convinced that I’m on the wrong track.”

— Dani Shapiro

71. “Moving to the country has been incredibly good for my work, for my sense of perspective.”

— Dani Shapiro

72. “I needed to slow down and quiet down deeply into a lot of these questions, yet at the same time what I was looking for, and continue to, is a way to have this exist within a regular, normal, modern life.”

— Dani Shapiro

73. “As a writer we are our own instruments; we need to protect our instrument, because no one will protect it if we don’t.”

— Dani Shapiro

74. “The Internet and all its lures are much, much harder than anything I’ve ever encountered. If you’re writing on a computer, the very instrument you’re writing on is already tainted by the world out there in all its permutations.”

— Dani Shapiro

75. “Open your hearts. Deep inside ourselves, we are all one and the same.”

— Dani Shapiro

76. “When I was starting out there was no Internet, there wasn’t this sense that you could be connected to other writers around the world. And that created a kind of innocence, or parochial quality, even in NYC.”

— Dani Shapiro

77. “After listening to my entire story, he quietly said: “You can say, “This is impossible, terrible.′ Or you can say, ‘This is beautiful, wonderful.’ You can imagine that you’re in exile. Or you can imagine that you have more than one home.”

— Dani Shapiro

78. “When a writer’s whole being is poured into a piece of work, there is never enough. The feeling of finally getting to the end of a piece of work, of making it as good as you can at that moment, is more of a relief than anything else, and then you wait for reviews.”

— Dani Shapiro

79. “I did want to feel like life’s all of one piece.”

— Dani Shapiro

80. “How do you suppose time works? A slippery succession of long hours adding up to ever-shorter days and years that disappear like falling dominoes?”

— Dani Shapiro

81. “It wasn’t so much that I was in search of answers. In fact, I was wary of the whole idea of answers. I wanted to climb all the way inside of the questions and see what was there.”

— Dani Shapiro

82. “You carry the pain and you also carry the reward.”

— Dani Shapiro

83. “I was doing a lot of yoga and learning to meditate, and I found that extremely helpful, and still do and hopefully always will.”

— Dani Shapiro

84. “I’m not giving you up,” she said. The thin shell holding me together cracked, and suddenly I was weeping with my whole body. “And you’d better not be giving me up,” she said. Every syllable, deliberate. “I’m not giving you up, Shirl,” I sobbed. “I was so afraid that – ” “I have fewer years ahead of me than behind me,” she said. “And you are my brother’s daughter.”

— Dani Shapiro

85. “I was beginning to see the danger in adhering to a single narrative, hewing to a story. The peril wasn’t only in getting it wrong. It was a kind of calcification, a narrowing, a perversion of reality that hardened and stilled the spirit.”

— Dani Shapiro

86. “It’s essential to have sacred time for writing. All successful authors have some daily commitment to keep on-track and moving forward.”

— Dani Shapiro

87. “I’m an urban person who loves living in the country.”

— Dani Shapiro

88. “I was in my early thirties writing about my early twenties, so there was this way of seeing my younger self from enough of a distance to have perspective but also not to feel that I had to protect myself. My dreams for myself then would have undersold myself in a way.”

— Dani Shapiro

89. “I do keep a tiny little journal in which I write passages that I read and want to hold on to. This practice is sort of the opposite of Twitter.”

— Dani Shapiro

90. “I want to bless that young couple as they cross Union Square. I want to deliver some kind of benediction upon them as – drunk on love – they meander the narrow streets of Alphabet City. I want to suggest that there will come a time when they will need something more than love.”

— Dani Shapiro

91. “The people who are with us by either happenstance or design during life-altering events become woven into the fabric of those events.”

— Dani Shapiro

92. “I have been writing all my life. Growing up, I wrote in soft-covered journals, in spiral-bound notebooks, in diaries with locks and keys. I wrote love letters and lies, stories and missives. When I wasn’t writing, I was reading. And when I wasn’t writing or reading, I was staring out the window, lost in thought. Life was elsewhere-I was sure of it-and writing was what took me there.”

— Dani Shapiro

93. “To forget oneself-to lose oneself in the music, in the moment- that kind of absorption seems to be at the heart of every creative endeavor.”

— Dani Shapiro

94. “I never feel so alive as when I’m writing and the work is going well.”

— Dani Shapiro

95. “I do strongly identify with being Jewish. I was raised Orthodox and had a childhood complicated by the fact that my father was deeply religious and my mother was not.”

— Dani Shapiro

96. “I’ve learned to be wary of those times when I think I know what I’m doing. I’ve discovered that my best work comes from the uncomfortable but fruitful feeling of not having a clue...”

— Dani Shapiro

97. “But today, something begins to shift. I see that there might be some way I can take the raw material of my life and transform it into something that has order and structure. I can make sense of what, until now, has been senseless.”

— Dani Shapiro

98. “When I sit down with my notebook, when I start scribbling words across the page, I find out what I’m feeling.”

— Dani Shapiro

99. “I’ve become convinced that our lives are shaped less by the mistakes we make than when we make them. There is less elasticity now. Less time to bounce back. And so I heed the urgent whisper and move with greater and greater deliberation.”

— Dani Shapiro

100. “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror,” Rilke wrote. Nearly.”

— Dani Shapiro