61 Quotes by Pam Houston

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.

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

Do you write novels?" I said."Novels, Lord no," she said. "I can't even stay married.

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.

And even though I knew in my head there’s nothing a man can do that a woman can’t, I also knew in my heart we can’t help doing it for different reasons. And just like a man will never understand exactly how a woman feels when she has a baby, or an orgasm, or the reasons why she’ll fight so hard to be loved, a woman can’t know in what way a man satisfies himself, what question he answers for himself, when he looks right at death.

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 of what the answer will be.

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.

For the people of my country," Renato said, "water is everything: love, life, religion... even God.""It is like that for me too," I said. "In English we call that a metaphor.""Of course," said Renato, "and water is the most abundant metaphor on earth.

I believe—like religion—that the glimmer, the metaphor, if you will, knows a great deal more than I do. And if I stay out of its way, it will reveal itself to me. I will become not so much its keeper as its conduit, and I will pass its wisdom on to the reader, without actually getting in its way” (79).