Top 50 Pam Houston Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The Universe has a plan to make sure we don’t ever stop learning, not only in our minds, but also in our hearts.”

— Pam Houston

2. “Dogs change lives. Half Buddha, half Bozo, they keep us tethered to the earth, and teach us to fly. Our dogs are our sanity keepers.”

— Pam Houston

3. “I’m always out looking for weird, beautiful things.”

— Pam Houston

4. “I wanted her to see that the only life worth living is a life full of love; that loss is always part of the equation; that love and loss conjoined are the best opportunity we get to live fully, to be our strongest, our most compassionate, our most graceful selves.”

— Pam Houston

5. “I will never regret not having children. What I regret is that I live in a world where in spite of everything, that decision is still not quite okay.”

— Pam Houston

6. “The language of the wilderness is the most beautiful language we have and it is our job to sing it, until and even after it is gone, no matter how much it hurts.”

— Pam Houston

7. “Movement helps keep me centered. I am a disaster, for instance, at sitting meditation, but I’m pretty decent at walking meditation.”

— Pam Houston

8. “It’s September 21st, a day I love for the balance it carries with it.”

— Pam Houston

9. “Life gives us what we need when we need it; receiving what it gives us is a whole other thing.”

— Pam Houston

10. “This is what you learned in college: A man desires the satisfaction of his desire; a woman desires the condition of desiring.”

— Pam Houston

11. “Traveling is my priority, because it drives the writing, so I teach around the travel, and sometimes the travel is the teaching.”

— Pam Houston

12. “My parents were travelers. Every time my parents got ten dollars ahead they went somewhere. That’s what they did. So I got the bug from them.”

— Pam Houston

13. “People are supposed to accumulate, I thought, as they get older, but I seem to be sloughing off, like a person wrapped in a hundred layers of cellophane, tearing one layer off at a time, trying to get down to me.”

— Pam Houston

14. “Being in the presence of the “other” seems to show me who I am in a way that is really important to me. I feel radically more comfortable in Laos, say, than I do in Pennsylvania.”

— Pam Houston

15. “Give me a labyrinth to walk and I can usually free my mind.”

— Pam Houston

16. “There was something about the prairie for me – it wasn’t where I had come from, but when I moved there it just took me in and I knew I couldn’t ever stop living under that big sky.”

— Pam Houston

17. “I always tell my students, about the biggest baddest things in life you must try to write small and light, save the big writing for the unexpected tiny thing that always makes or breaks a story.”

— Pam Houston

18. “I write well on the road. I have the energy, I have the motivation to write. I’m happy when I’m on the road.”

— Pam Houston

19. “It would have been so perfectly ironic if I had been killed by the dog, because I was petting a dog who was not used to being pet, because I think I’m some kind of dog whisperer, and I think I can make any dog love me.”

— Pam Houston

20. “Cheryl Strayed is a courageous, gritty, and deceptively elegant writer.”

— Pam Houston

21. “And even if the jig is up, even if it is really game over, what better time to sing about the earth than when it is critically, even fatally, wounded at our hands.”

— Pam Houston

22. “I always think, when I’m in motion, writing seems like the most natural thing.”

— Pam Houston

23. “When a book is in its final stages, I’ve just got to be home, looking at it seventeen hours a day, and that’s fine. But all that initial creation of the early drafts, I’d just as soon write it on the road in any extreme place. That’s sort of ideal.”

— Pam Houston

24. “Find yourself a place in the universe,′ she said, ’a place where the dirt feels like goodness under your feet. Take the right picture and a man will walk into it. If you can bear him even a little, then for a while let him stay.”

— Pam Houston

25. “I’ve always said the toughest thing about learning to feel your feelings is that then you have to feel your feelings...”

— Pam Houston

26. “One thing I’m always thinking about myself is what am I willing to make up? And the answer is not much.”

— Pam Houston

27. “Stillness is a harder concept for me than ecstasy, but I can imagine it best when I am fully present and paying strict attention to a place I am moving through.”

— Pam Houston

28. “When you look into your baby’s eyes,” my friend Sarah once said to me, “that will become your Tibet.” I have no doubt that looking into one’s own baby’s eyes is many inexpressibly wonderful things, but one thing it is not is Tibet.”

— Pam Houston

29. “We call such a limited number of relationships love in our lives, but there is always love around us – it’s as ubiquitous as oxygen. It lives in the houses where we’ve slept, the kitchens where we’ve cooked, in the food we’ve prepared for the people we love and in the walls we have shaped with our hands.”

— Pam Houston

30. “We are all dying, and because of us, so is the earth. That’s the most terrible, the most painful in my entire repertoire of self-torturing thoughts. But it isn’t dead yet and neither are we. Are we going to drop the earth off at the vet, say goodbye at the door, and leave her to die in the hands of strangers? We can decide, even now, not to turn our backs on her in her illness. We can still decide not to let her die alone.”

— Pam Houston

31. “I’m about going out in the world and noticing stuff, and going home and writing it down, and putting it next to other stuff I’ve noticed and seeing what happens.”

— Pam Houston

32. “How do we become who we are in the world? We ask the world to teach us. But we have to ask with an open heart, with no idea what the answer will be.”

— Pam Houston

33. “For me, the shaping of the story is more important than accuracy.”

— Pam Houston

34. “Remember this remember this remember this the next time you think it’s over, because some man, or some hope, or some life takes away instead of gives. Remember this and get on an airplane, a small one if possible, because it always works.”

— Pam Houston

35. “Could a person mourn and be joyful simultaneously? I understood it as the challenge of the twenty-first century. Maybe it was simply what being a grown up meant.”

— Pam Houston

36. “Sometimes I’m writing for magazines on assignment, but the university has to be patient with me. I mean, during the ten-week periods that I have a class, I’m there every Thursday night or whatever it is, but sometimes that’s all I’m there, because I’m somewhere else the rest of the time.”

— Pam Houston

37. “If a situation requires swearing to God it is – by definition – extreme.”

— Pam Houston

38. “I’m not very interested in telling the facts. I have a lot of investment in telling the truth.”

— Pam Houston

39. “Nobody gets to have it all, not even Donald Trump. You will have one thing or another depending on what choice you make. Or you will have both things in limited amounts, and that might turn out to be perfect, just exactly the life you want.”

— Pam Houston

40. “I have spent most of my life outside, but for the last three years, I have been walking five miles a day, minimum, wherever I am, urban or rural, and can attest to the magnitude of the natural beauty that is left. Beauty worth seeing, worth singing, worth saving, whatever that word can mean now. There is beauty in a desert, even one that is expanding. There is beauty in the ocean, even one that is on the rise.”

— Pam Houston

41. “We call such a limited number of relationships love in our lives, but there is always love around us – it’s as ubiquitous as oxygen.”

— Pam Houston

42. “Somewhere in the process I started writing toward an answer to the question I wake up with every morning and go to bed with every night. How do I find hope on a dying planet, and if there is no hope to be found, how do I live in its absence? In what state of being? Respect? Tenderness? Unmitigated love? The rich and sometimes deeply clarifying dreamscape of vast inconsolable grief?”

— Pam Houston

43. “How to hang on to that full-body joy I knew I was capable of and still understand it as elegy.”

— Pam Houston

44. “To the people in Creede I am intelligent, suspiciously sophisticated and elitist to the point of being absurd. To the people at UC Davis I am quaint, a little slow on the uptake and far too earnest to even believe.”

— Pam Houston

45. “I’ve been to a lot of school and read a lot of thick books, but at my very core there’s a made-for-TV-movie mentality I don’t think i will ever shake.”

— Pam Houston

Featured in: Romance Quotes

46. “The more important question, of course, was what the new Lucy would do, and even though I was pretty sure the old Lucy wouldn’t be around much anymore, I was a little bit afraid the new Lucy hadn’t yet shown up.”

— Pam Houston

47. “It’s hard for anybody to put their finger on the moment when life changes from being something that is nearly all in front of you to something that happened while your attention was elsewhere.”

— Pam Houston

48. “When I was a little kid, I used to walk miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles of railroad tracks.”

— Pam Houston

49. “I write really well on the road.”

— Pam Houston

50. “I’ve always traveled. I’m a professor in a limited way. I teach one class two quarters out of four, so I get traveling done.”

— Pam Houston