Top 150 Dani Shapiro Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Form serves us best when it works as an obstruction to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work and that when we no longer know which way to go we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.” –.”

— Dani Shapiro

102. “How do we live the writer’s life? There’s only one simple answer: ‘we write.’”

— Dani Shapiro

103. “If I waited to be in the mood to write, I’d barely have a chapbook of material to my name. Who would ever be in the mood to write? Do marathon runners get in the mood to run? Do teachers wake up with the urge to lecture? I don’t know, but I doubt it. My guess is that it’s the very act that is generative. The doing of the thing that makes possible the desire for it.”

— Dani Shapiro

104. “There is in each of us a fundamental split between what we think we know and what we know but may never be able to think.”

— Dani Shapiro

105. “If there’s anything weirder than an introverted writer going to lots of social functions, it’s an introverted writer being converted into an accidental guru.”

— Dani Shapiro

106. “I started realising that the themes running through all of my novels were really haunting and obsessing me about my own life.”

— Dani Shapiro

107. “My newfound awareness was both gauntlet and gift. The choice wasn’t to see it as one or the other. It was to embrace both.”

— Dani Shapiro

108. “Adjectives have become verbs: I favorited it. Verbs have become nouns. How many likes do you have? Time is moving at such an accelerated rate that completing sentences now seems baroque.”

— Dani Shapiro

109. “What was going on inside of me became louder because everything around me became quieter.”

— Dani Shapiro

110. “As a fiction writer, that’s been a preoccupation of mine: Can you really just close the door and leave the past back there behind you, or is the door going to blow open at some point?”

— Dani Shapiro

111. “I want a stable man in my life. One who will be there, but will give me enough room to be free, to breathe, to live. And one I can love, but not sacrifice my soul for.”

— Dani Shapiro

112. “What never fail to draw me in, however, are secrets. Secrets within families. Secrets we keep out of shame, or self-protectiveness, or denial. Secrets and their corrosive power. Secrets we keep from one another in the name of love.”

— Dani Shapiro

113. “If I’m not writing, my heart hardens, rather than lifts.”

— Dani Shapiro

114. “As writers, it is our job not only to imagine, but to witness.”

— Dani Shapiro

115. “We are tyrannized by our options.”

— Dani Shapiro

116. “She is practicing because she knows there is no difference between practice and art. The practice is the art.”

— Dani Shapiro

117. “Success is so fleeting; even if you get a good book deal, or your book is a huge success, there’s always the fear: ‘What about the next one?’”

— Dani Shapiro

118. “The more we have at stake, the harder it is to make the leap into writing. The more we think about who’s going to read it, what they’re going to think, how many copies will be printed, whether this magazine or that magazine will accept it for publication, the further away we are from accomplishing anything alive on the page.”

— Dani Shapiro

119. “While in Aspen, I was on a panel one evening with Andre Dubus III, who spoke of what happens when a memoir devolves into self-pity: “Wah, wah, wah. Should we call the wambulance?”

— Dani Shapiro

120. “Each fork in the road: the choice to stay home, to go out, to catch the flight, or cancel it, to take the 1 train, to stop at the bar on the corner. The chance encounters, split-second decisions that make the design – that are the design.”

— Dani Shapiro

121. “Our minds simply don’t function in some sort of narrative chronology. I think that one of the great gifts of writing fiction is being able to think about that.”

— Dani Shapiro

122. “Is who we are the same as who we believe ourselves to be?”

— Dani Shapiro

123. “The only graceful thing to do is recognize and embrace what is actually happening, rather than fight against it.”

— Dani Shapiro

124. “I couldn’t write. I grew tense. I was strangled by my own ego, by my petty desire for what I perceived to be the literary brass ring. I was missing the point, of course. The reward is in the doing.”

— Dani Shapiro

125. “Our minds have a tendency to wander. To duck and feint and keep us at a slight remove from the moment at hand.”

— Dani Shapiro

126. “I’ll have my students try to follow their minds during the course of a day, just to see the way their minds work, the way our minds hop from thing to thing to thing. The Internet mirrors that to such a degree you can actually see it. Show me your search history and I’ll show you who you are.”

— Dani Shapiro

127. “There is no other life than this. You would not have stumbled into the vastly imperfect, beautiful, impossible present.”

— Dani Shapiro

128. “The writing life requires courage, patience, persistence, empathy, openness, and the ability to deal with rejection. It requires the willingness to be alone with oneself. To be gentle with oneself. To look at the world without blinders on. To observe and withstand what one sees. To be disciplined, and at the same time, take risks. To be willing to fail-not just once, but again and again, over the course of a lifetime.”

— Dani Shapiro

129. “I try to remember that the job – as well as the plight, and the unexpected joy – of the artist is to embrace uncertainty, to be sharpened and honed by it.”

— Dani Shapiro

130. “I tell my students, who are concerned with the question of betrayal, that when it comes to memoir, there is no such thing as absolute truth – only the truth that is singularly their own. I say this not to release them from responsibility but to illuminate the subjectivity of our inner lives. One person’s experience is not another’s.”

— Dani Shapiro

131. “It turns out that it is possible to live an entire life – even an examined life, to the degree that I had relentlessly examined mine – and still not know the truth of oneself.”

— Dani Shapiro

132. “It would be many years before I began to understand that all of life is practice: writing, driving, hiking, brushing teeth, packing lunch boxes, making beds, cooking dinner, making love, walking dogs, even sleeping. We are always practicing. Only practicing.”

— Dani Shapiro

133. “Apparently, using two spaces after a period has become anachronistic. But tell that to my right thumb. –.”

— Dani Shapiro

134. “We’re all simultaneously separated and connected by our devices, staring into our little screens, and also hungry for experience and community.”

— Dani Shapiro

135. “How can I tell her that her lists will not protect her?”

— Dani Shapiro

136. “I can’t stand seeing their sympathy. For years, vital parts of me have been frozen, and since the accident I felt myself thawing, dripping, becoming more human than I can bear.”

— Dani Shapiro

137. “When I was writing my first novel, I smoked cigarettes. And when I think about what it was like to smoke, I remember exactly the feeling of sitting in front of my big old computer in that little room where I wrote my first novel.”

— Dani Shapiro

138. “I could spend two years cross-legged on my floor and feel like I was working.”

— Dani Shapiro

139. “I think so much about how we read, about the nature of solitude, and of community, is changing in ways that none of us yet understand.”

— Dani Shapiro

140. “Our pain is a part of who we authentically are.”

— Dani Shapiro

141. “I often envy my friends who are visual artists. Visual artists have other things to work with. Other media. I envy my sculptor friends: they have hunks of matter. Marble. Wood. It’s physical, which I find very appealing. What we have is nothing, is just glaringly blank.”

— Dani Shapiro

142. “But I was at the threshold of understanding what Shirley had meant about my not being an accident of history. Or rather: either all of us are accidents of history or none of us are. One sperm, one egg, one moment. An interruption – a ringing phone, a knock on the door, a flashlight through the car window – a single second one way or the other and the result would be an entirely different human being. Mine was just more complicated, an accident involving vials, syringes, contracts, and secrets.”

— Dani Shapiro

143. “It’s not gender-specific, but I do think it’s women who tend to start having that sort of little whispering voice of “I want more here” and “I want more for my family.””

— Dani Shapiro

144. “Always lists to be made, as if writing items in neat vertical rows might stave off randomness and chaos.”

— Dani Shapiro

145. “I believe he doesn’t regret it. But still, has being with me stopped him from being him?”

— Dani Shapiro

146. “To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land.”

— Dani Shapiro

147. “Either all of us are accidents of history or none of us are.”

— Dani Shapiro

148. “One afternoon I opened an email from her that included a passage from the work of Pema Chodron, a Buddhist teacher and writer whom I had long admired. “To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land.”

— Dani Shapiro

149. “But when the self – not a fictional character – is the landscape of the story, we can’t afford to be blind to our own themes and the strands weaving through them. And so we must make a map, even as the ground shifts beneath us. This is, of course, not only a literary problem. –.”

— Dani Shapiro

150. “Donating sperm was not the same as, say, donating a kidney. Or a retina. It was the passing along of an essence that was inseparable from personhood itself.”

— Dani Shapiro