Best 46 quotes of Pam Houston on MyQuotes

Pam Houston

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    Pam Houston

    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.

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    Pam Houston

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

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    Pam Houston

    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.

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    Pam Houston

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

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    Pam Houston

    Every day at about four o'clock, I would go up to a farmhouse - or whatever kind of house was around - and knock on the door and say, "Hi, I'm biking across Canada, and I'm wondering if I could pitch my tent on your land." And sometimes people slammed the door in my face, but the vast majority of the time they said, "Of course," and then they said, "Come for dinner," and then they packed me food the next day and fed me breakfast and sometimes they got out the bottle of wine they'd been saving for a special occasion.

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    Pam Houston

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

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    Pam Houston

    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.

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    Pam Houston

    I always think, when I'm in motion, writing seems like the most natural thing.

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    Pam Houston

    I'm always out looking for weird, beautiful things.

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    Pam Houston

    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.

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    Pam Houston

    I'm not very interested in telling the facts. I have a lot of investment in telling the truth.

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    Pam Houston

    in general, I feel most comfortable between known quantities.

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    Pam Houston

    It's September 21st, a day I love for the balance it carries with it.

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    Pam Houston

    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.

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    Pam Houston

    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.

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    Pam Houston

    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.

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    Pam Houston

    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.

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    Pam Houston

    I was in Mongolia, pretty extreme situations. We were sick with dysentery, we were sick with bronchitis. I had been bitten by a dog for the first time in my life and my whole hand was black, and there was no way to even think of getting a rabies shot without driving for five days, and then you wouldn't have wanted that needle in your skin anyway. And I had my period. Everything was wrong at one time. Like, I couldn't have been more uncomfortable. And I stayed up - it was too cold to sleep.

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    Pam Houston

    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.

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    Pam Houston

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

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    Pam Houston

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

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    Pam Houston

    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.

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    Pam Houston

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

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    Pam Houston

    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.

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    Pam Houston

    Praise Roxane Gay for her big-hearted self-examining intelligence, for her inclusive and forgiving stance, for her courage and determination . . . for saying out loud the things we were thinking, for guiding us back to ourselves and returning to us what was ours all along.

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    Pam Houston

    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.

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    Pam Houston

    Sometimes no matter how well you prepare, no matter how conservative your decision making, no matter how few Y chromosomes are along on your trip, you can still find yourself in a mud slide or a hurricane without a dry piece of clothing to your name. But those of us who have given our time and usually our hearts to outdoorsmen over the years know that, for many of them, it's not really a wilderness trip unless, MacGyver-like, they have to make a fire out of a pair of shorts, a glow stick, and a ketchup bottle; it's not really an adventure until someone gets airlifted out.

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    Pam Houston

    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.

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    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.

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    Pam Houston

    There are three principles to remember if you are to teach a human being anything, and they are consistency, consistency, consistency.They are such fragile creatures to begin with, with poor eyes, poorer hearing, and no sense of smell left to speak of, it's no wonder they are made of fear. Some centuries ago they moved inside and with that move went nine-tenths of their intuition. It is almost unmerciful to make them live so long when they spend their lives in so much pain.

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    Pam Houston

    There's this great Ron Carlson story, "A Note on the Type," and it's about this guy who keeps escaping from prison. He's really good at escaping, but he gets caught all the time, because he can't stop writing his name on underpasses where he's running from the law. And there's this whole beautiful paragraph about how to run is to write. And, you know, it's obviously about the writer's life.

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    Pam Houston

    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.

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    Pam Houston

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

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    Pam Houston

    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.

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    Pam Houston

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

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    Pam Houston

    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.

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    Pam Houston

    Another lesson from my childhood: once the thing I fear most happens, there’s no place to go but up. Being cut out of my father’s Cadillac with a chain saw by highway patrollers on Christmas Eve, for instance, was so much better than sitting in the bar with him while he had his fourth martini knowing black ice was forming on the road outside. Being in the safety of the hospital while they applied my three-quarter body cast will all of the nurses making a big fuss over my four-year-old self was so much better than knowing my father was about to pick me up and throw me across the room.

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    Pam Houston

    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.

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    Pam Houston

    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.

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    Pam Houston

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

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    Pam Houston

    How will we sing when Miami goes underwater, when the raft of garbage in the ocean gets as big as Texas, when the only remaining polar bear draws his last breath, when fracking, when Keystone, when Pruitt? I don’t know. And I imagine, sometimes, often, we will get it wrong. But I’m not celebrating the earth because I am an optimist—though I am an optimist. I am celebrating because this magnificent rock we live on demands celebration. I am celebrating because how in the face of this earth could I not?

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    Pam Houston

    I guess I don't believe you can have it all. I don't believe any of us can. In fact, I believe the very expression having it all is not only a myth but also a symptom of how sick we are in our contemporary culture. Nobody gets to have it all...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'" (175).

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    Pam Houston

    It also seems honorable that another woman would value motherhood over all my priorities. But I do not believe that I am selfish and she is not. There are women who chose motherhood for selfish reasons. There are mothers who act selfishly even if they chose motherhood in a burst of altruistic love. Selfishness and generosity are not relegated to particular life choices and if generosity is a worthy life goal--and I believe it is--perhaps our task is to choose the path that for us creates its best opportunity.

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    Pam Houston

    Several times in my life, I’ve sat with women, friends of mine, who reveal, sometimes shyly, sometimes proudly, bruises of one kind or another, and I know I’ve said, “If it happens one time, leave him,” I’ve said, “It doesn’t matter how much you love him. Leave him if it happens one time.” And I’ve said it with utter confidence, as if I knew what the hell I was talking about, as if violence was something that could be easily defined.

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    Pam Houston

    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?

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    Pam Houston

    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.