Best 38 quotes of Nick Flynn on MyQuotes

Alcohol is the river we sit on the banks of, contemplating. Sometimes we watch ourselves float past, sometimes we watch ourselves sink.

By the time I make my way to the border of Mauritania, to the edge of the Sahara, I see no end to being lost. You can spend your entire life simply falling in that direction. It isn't a station you reach but just the general state of going down. Once you make it back, if you make it back, you will stand before your long-lost friends but in some essential way they will no longer know you.

By the time I'm nine I know the world is a dangerous place.  I've heard whispers about razorblades in apples, about Charlie Manson and his family.  But no one is offering any clear information.

Certain stories we carry with us, events in our life, they define who we are. It's not a matter of getting over anything; we have to make the best of it.

I became an electrician after high school. But I always had this thing in me to write. But it was always a little shameful. To say you were a poet was saying you were kind of crazy, and I carried that around for a long time. I still kind of carry that. And I think it might be true, actually.

I can weep pretty easily. I can get tears in my eyes from a beautiful work of art.

If it had been a heart attack, the newspapermight have used the word massive,as if a mountain range had openedinside her, but insteadit used the word suddenly, a light coming onin an empty room. The telephonefell from my shoulder, a black parrot repeatingsomething happened, something awfula sunday, dusky. If it had beenterminal, we could have cradled heras she grew smaller, wiped her mouth,said good-bye. But it was sudden,how overnight we could be orphaned& the world became a bell we'd crawl inside& the ringing all we'd eat.

If you're going to write about someone's life, you don't just use them for wallpaper. You have to honor and respect that life.

I get inspired by my friends, and if a friend is a writer, that is even deeper.

In life you get one take, and it's perfect. It's strange, afterwards you might think I shouldn't have reacted that way, but that's the way you reacted. That's your take; that's all you get.

In my experience, whatever happens clings to us like barnacles on the hull of a ship, slowing us slightly, both uglifying and giving us texture. You can scrape all you want, you can, if you have money, hire someone else to scrape, but the barnacles will come back or at least leave a blemish on the steel.

I offer Emily half of my hit of acid- Love Saves the Day. It's my second or third time tripping, Emily's first, and she's understandably trepid. Awake all night, at one point I find her touching her reflection in a cruelly lit dorm bathroom, asking if she'll ever be the same. I kiss her then for the first time and whisper, No.

Memoir is actually the most egoless genre, even though it might seem ostensibly so much ego-driven. In order for it to succeed, you have to dissolve the self into these larger universal truths, and explore these deeper mysteries. If it’s purely autobiographical and ego-driven, it’s going to fail.

On a good day I write, all day.

Perhaps everyone has a story that could break your heart.

Perhaps it is our fear, that in the silence between stories, in the moment of falling, the fear that we will never find the one story which will save us, and so we lunge for another, and we feel safe again, if only for as long as we are telling it.

Read as much as you can. Write only when you feel the inner need to do so. And don’t ever rush into print.

Some part of me knew he would show up, that if I stood in one place long enough he would find me, like you're taught to do when you're lost. But they never taught us what to do if both of you are lost, and you both end up in the same place, waiting.

The first book I could call mine, my first book, was a picture book, The Magic Monkey - it was adapted from an old Chinese legend by a thirteen-year-old prodigy named Plato Chan with the help of his sister.

There are many ways to drown, only the most obvious wave their arms as they're going under.

There is a physics to the world, which non-fiction has a contract to stand in awe of, otherwise it becomes completely self-centered and ego-driven, which is the death of a memoir.

Trinity Park lies directly across from the library, Trinity Church rising like a midieval thought amidst the glass and steel towers.

We got him to talk to a psych doctor once, the doctor asked if he heard things other people don't. Sure, Paul answered, I hear birds in the morning when everyone's sleeping, I hear trees rustling when no one's around.

What you fear your whole life comes to pass. You end up living toward it, you spend your life running from it but your foot is nailed to the sidewalk. You circle around it until you wear yourself own.

Who doesn't want to just disappear, at some point in the day, in a year, to just step off the map and float?

Writers, especially poets, are particularly prone to madness.

Writers, especially poets, are particularly prone to madness. There exists a striking association between creativity and manic depression. Why are more creative people prone to madness? They have more than average amounts of energies and abilities to see things in a fresh and original way—then because they also have depression, I think they’re more in touch with human suffering.

But what of Ham? It didn’t matter if he told anyone about his drunken father or not, if he chided him or tried to dress him, if he lifted his struggling body back into bed, if he took his hand and told him where to place his feet, none of this changed the fact of what he’d seen. It’s possible he opened a door innocently, followed the sound of Noah’s voice cursing God and the sky, possible he didn’t even look, that he turned away before seeing. And it’s likely that Noah hadn’t noticed the door opening, couldn’t have told you who had come in, which son, wouldn’t remember anyway. Apparently it’s God’s call. Ham saw his father drunken and naked, and for this he was cursed, and all of his offspring, and the races that led from these offspring, accursed forever.

Even a life raft is only supposed to get you from the sinking ship back to land, you were never intended to live in the life raft, to drift years on end, in sight of land but never close enough.

I know cigarettes can kill & wonder why she wants to die.

If it had been a heart attack, the newspaper might have used the word massive, as if a mountain range had opened inside her, but instead it used the word suddenly, a light coming on in an empty room. The telephone fell from my shoulder, a black parrot repeating something happened, something awful a sunday, dusky. If it had been terminal, we could have cradled her as she grew smaller, wiped her mouth, said good-bye. But it was sudden, how overnight we could be orphaned & the world became a bell we'd crawl inside & the ringing all we'd eat.

I was unable to throw myself in the ocean,” she writes, the handwriting more erratic as the painkillers seep into every cell, shutting out lights in empty rooms.

My friend asked me if it had been cathartic, to write my memoir. I looked down at the sculptures—it was cathartic for me to look at them, but I could imagine it might have been hell to make them (I was cheered / when I came first to know / that there were flowers also / in hell). No, I answered—how was it for you to read it? Aristotle, in his Poetics, never promised catharsis for the makers of art, only for the audience.

My statement to Harris that his book contains much to admire is specious hyperbole. In The End of Faith, Harris rails against religious fundamentalism, which seems obvious, as well as against religious moderates, which seems intolerant.

The South African artist William Kentridge speaks to this type of certainty: 'To say that one needs art, or politics, that incorporate ambiguity and contradiction is not to say that one then stops recognizing and condemning things as evil. However, it might stop one being so utterly convinced of the certainty of one's own solutions. There needs to be a strong understanding of fallibility and how the very act of certainty or authoritativeness can bring disasters.' The outcome of the current crisis is already determined.

What I was trying to say, maybe, is that I don't know what it is I'm capable of transforming into.

When my grandmother comes to dinner at our house she always carries her own jar of Turner’s Special Blend. She knows how much she needs and doesn’t want to be caught short. My brother remembers her at Christmas one year, an especially weepy time for her, when she put her hands around his neck and murmured, My little angel, you wouldn’t be so hard to kill. And though he knew it was only the whiskey talking, he also knew that the whiskey talked daily.

You do know, right, that between the no- longer & the still- to-come you are being continually tattooed, inked with the skulls of everyone you’ve ever loved—the you & the you & the you & the you—you don’t sit in a chair, thumb through a binder, pick a design, it simply happens each time you bring your fingers to your face to inhale him back into you . . . tiny skulls, some of us are covered. You, love, could simply tattoo an open door, light pouring in from somewhere outside, you could make your body a door so it appears you (let her fill you) are made of light.