Nick Flynn Quotes

Perhaps everyone has a story that could break your heart.

On a good day I write, all day.

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.

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

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

Writers, especially poets, are particularly prone to madness.

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.

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.

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.

The attention one gets from being a poet isnt great.

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

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

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.

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

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

I believe poetry has very little to do with memory.

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

inside us, a flower taken whole, a field built inside.

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

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

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

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

It’s the way I walk through the world, carrying that fear, that the beloved will go, will die, and that I will be the one to blame.

If it had been a heart attack, the new

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

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

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.

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.

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.