Pam Houston Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

I've always said the toughest thing about learning to feel your feelings is that then you have to feel your feelings.

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.

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

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

I write really well on the road.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

in general, I feel most comfortable between known quantities.

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

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.

For me, the shaping of the story is more important than accuracy.

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

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.

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

The Universe has a plan to make sure we don't ever stop learning, not only in our minds, but also in our hearts.

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

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.

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.

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