Best 8 quotes of Sarah Gerard on MyQuotes

Florida is kind of notorious. But also because it's a rich place. Phonetically, narratively, historically. I wanted to know Florida better and I could easily find stories. My relationship with Florida is fraught because I didn't want to be living there always, but then after I left I really missed it.

I feel like I always learn when I'm writing, even when I'm not writing about myself. I'm careful not to judge; I try to internalize and empathize with the characters. Stepping into that person's shoes is transformative. It changes you. Looking at my own life, it's also humbling to write.

In "Mother-Father-God," I talk about how the new thought movement led me to be superstitious. I think that might resonate with a lot of Americans, the superstition around optimism, like 'don't say anything negative' because you might jinx yourself with your thinking.

I was interested in the ways we can write biography. When you're first starting to write about your own life it feels so shapeless because you don't know how to make your own story cohesive. How do I pluck a story out of the entirety of what it means to be alive. It occurred to me recently that when you're telling a story about your own life, rather than taking a chunk, you're kinda like lifting a thread from a loom.

When you write about people three dimensionally, it inspires a sense of empathy. That would be something that I want people to take away from all my writing, a feeling of emotionality, connection, and empathy.

Writing helps us heal in certain way, but it doesn't make the experience of thinking about writing that occasion any less painful. When you revisit trauma, you don't know what's going to be triggering for you because you don't know how it's connected in your mind. So in the same way when we write something, it doesn't completely resolve the experience for us. It can feel therapeutic, but that's not the reason why I do it. I do it to ask a question, or just to find meaning.

I am becoming in coming undone. I unbind. I rise like the morning: revolution.

some of the first words a child learns are brand names, because they don’t have to sound them out. It becomes part of your environmental vocabulary [Whitney Curry Wimbish & Sarah Gerard, "The Binary Companion," LA Review of Books, January 22, 2015].