Nick Flynn

“When I was a child, writing was the worst possible choice of a career in my family.”

“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.”

“Everything we do, I'd imagine, influences everything we will do.”

“Our job as writers, as far as I can tell, is to attempt to express what seems inexpressible.”

“Change is one of the only constants in Buddhism; as meditation became the way I breathed in the days, this became apparent.”

“I had to steel myself against this psychic devastation - to see your father on the street. It's hard enough to pick up somebody you don't know from the streets, and then to actually have other people pick your father up - it was psychically devastating.”

“OUT of that moment Jesus was nailed to his cross flowed our attempts to represent it, to create a narrative that could contain it. Yet the body, hanging there, is still, simply, terrible. Caravaggio’s genius was to paint Jesus with dirty feet, to bring him back down to earth.”

“That soldiers do terrible things during wartime should not surprise us.”

“That Dick Cheney is pro-torture surprises no one; he freely admits it.”

“If it had been a heart attack, the newspaper,as if a mountain range had openedinside her, but instead, a light coming onin an empty room. The telephonefell from my shoulder, a black parrot repeatinga sunday, dusky. If it had been, we could have cradled heras she grew smaller, wiped her mouth,,how overnight we could be orphaned& the world became a bell we'd crawl inside& the ringing all we'd eat.”

“That's the thing about a book: You're in the public life for a little bit, and then you sort of go away for a little while - several years, in my case - and then you come out again, hopefully.”

“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.”

“For the first few months, I was a comically inept parent. The first night home from the hospital, I held her bare body against my bare chest until a friend who was a doctor came by and asked what I was doing, and told me to put some clothes on that baby.”

“I'm not sure why working at a homeless shelter made sense to me, except that I needed to immerse myself in some sort of larger real-life situation to get me out of the cage of my mind, in some ways.”

“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.”

“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.”

“You do know, right,that between the no-longer & the still-to-comeyou are being continuallytattooed, inkedwith the skulls ofeveryoneyou’ve ever loved—the you& the you& the you & the you—you don’tsit in a chair, thumbthrough a binder, pick adesign, it simplyhappens each time youbring your fingers to your faceto inhale him back into you . . .tiny skulls, some of us arecovered. You, love, couldsimply tattoo an opendoor, lightpouring in from somewhereoutside, youcould make your body a doorso it appears you(let her fill you) are madeof light.”

“The attention one gets from being a poet isn't great.”

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