Pat Schneider > Quotes

“It is a kind of love, is it not?
How the cup holds the tea,
How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,
How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes
Or toes. How soles of feet know
Where they're supposed to be.
I've been thinking about the patience
Of ordinary things, how clothes
Wait respectfully in closets
And soap dries quietly in the dish,
And towels drink the wet
From the skin of the back.
And the lovely repetition of stairs.
And what is more generous than a window?”
― Pat Schneider, Another River

“I learned without her saying a word that there are truly many ways to pray, and lighting a candle is one of them.”
― Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

“Be led by your joy.”
― Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

“What a pity. How the stars
and seas and rivers
in their fragile lace of fog
go on without us
morning after morning,
year after year.
And we disappear.”
― Pat Schneider, Another River

“Putting words onto paper—when it is done as an honest act of search or connection, rather than as an act of manipulation, performance, self-aggrandizement or self-protection—is a holy act.”
― Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

“Writing and prayer are both a form of love, and love takes courage.”
― Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

“I go fishing in my mind. I put out bait, the bait of my own longing, my desire, and my hunger for connection, for a tug of something alive at the end of a line. Something that I may have to struggle with to pull in, but that will be wild and important to me, whether I keep it or let it go.”
― Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

“Both writing and praying are acts of deep vulnerability.”
― Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

“If I am an artist, I have a vocation. As one drawn to a lover or called to a religious mission, I go to my work—my writing—because it is essential to my happiness.”
― Pat Schneider, Writing Alone and with Others

“If we can't forget, how can we forgive? I believe that forgiving can't be done by willpower alone. I can will myself to write out my own memories and feelings. I can will myself to imagine onto the page how someone else may have felt. I can will myself to research someone else's life in order to better understand what happened. But I don't think I can forgive by simply willing to forgive. Forgiving happens to us when our hearts are ready. Sometimes it takes the form of working on our own story until quietly, often surprisingly, we simply let go of the hurt. Sometimes forgiving makes it possible to pick up the pieces of a broken relationship and begin again. Sometimes it means letting a relationship go. We can't forgive through willpower. What we can do is work toward readiness of heart. Writing as a spiritual practice can be that kind of work.

When our heart is ready, we often don't even know it until forgiveness happens within us. It is a gift.”
― Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

“The more we open ourselves to love, the larger our capacity for love becomes.”
― Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

“Surprise is a major factor in distinguishing an answer to prayer from a projection of my own mental processes. When I can’t believe I made up the answer myself, I have to look around to see where it came from.”
― Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

“Writing is an animal that lives in the soul. It must not be whipped into doing tricks. It is not a circus animal. It can be fierce, but it is not malevolent. It can be playful, but it is not without wisdom. Above all, it is wild. A wild animal has to sleep sometimes. This is a time of deep sleep for my writing.”
― Pat Schneider, Writing Alone and with Others

“Jesus said, “But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret.”
― Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

“It occurred to me that when I begin to write, I open myself and wait. And when I turn toward an inner spiritual awareness, I open myself and wait.”
― Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

“She begins, “What is the question we spend our entire lives asking?” and answers, “Our question is this: Are we loved? I don’t mean by one another.” She closes her sermon to the snakes with these words: “I am like you, curious and small. Like you, I pause alertly and open my senses to try to read the air, the clouds, the sun’s slant, the little movements of the animals, all in the hope I will learn the secret of whether I am loved.”
― Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

“I am like you, curious and small. Like you, I pause alertly and open my senses to try to read the air, the clouds, the sun’s slant, the little movements of the animals, all in the hope I will learn the secret of whether I am loved.”5”
― Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

“God’s love is God’s attention.”
― Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

“Darkness and light are inextricably bound together.”
― Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

“Follow, poet, follow right to the bottom of the night. I have no choice but to pursue the deepest truth my life has given me.”
― Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

“But if you worry about other people as you write a first draft, you will not be able to free your unconscious mind to give up its treasures. It will be bound by the great dogs of your fear,”
― Pat Schneider, Writing Alone and with Others

“In writing, we see, sometimes with fear and trembling, who we have been, who we really are, and we glimpse now and then who we might become.”
― Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

“Maybe the bottom of my own night is a darkness I cannot descend into without “the light that is within me” becoming dark.”
― Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

“Martha Graham, speaking to dancers, could have been speaking to any artist, any writer: There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening which is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist.”
― Pat Schneider, Writing Alone and with Others

“The self you leave behind
is only a skin you have outgrown.
Don't grieve for it.
Look to the wet, raw, unfinished
self, the one you are becoming.
The world, too, sheds its skin:
politicians, cataclysms, ordinary days.”
― Pat Schneider, Olive Street transfer

“There is a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen about a soldier who is going through a forest. He meets an old woman who gives him a magic apron and sends him down into a deep shaft. He finds rooms of treasure as he goes deeper and deeper—each treasure greater than the last and each treasure guarded by a terrifying dog, each dog with larger eyes. The first one has eyes as big as saucers; the last one has eyes as big as wagon wheels. He does as the old woman told him: spreads out the apron, picks up each dog and puts it on the apron, and this makes him safe. In the first room he finds copper and fills his pockets. In the second room he finds silver and has to empty his pockets of copper to make room for silver. In the third room he finds gold and has to throw away the silver in order to gather the greater treasure. This tale is a metaphor for the process of making art. There is danger in going down into the unknown. What we will find there, in the unconscious where creation happens, may call for all our skill, all our intuition. It may change us; it may redefine our lives. But I believe we have no other choice if we are to be artist/writers. The act of writing is a tremendous adventure into the unknown, always fraught with danger. But the deeper you go and the longer you work at your art, the greater will be your treasure.”
― Pat Schneider, Writing Alone and with Others

“There are cultural and societal prejudices that make it hard for us to write. It has been my experience that for some men, the struggle to write involves the prejudice that it is not “manly” to reveal the inner life, the secrets of the heart and of the imagination. For many women, the struggle to write is at base a struggle against the idea that women’s lives are not of interest as literature. I have a friend whose husband once said after her first book had been published, “You sit there writing as if your life had some significance.”
― Pat Schneider, Writing Alone and with Others

“To pray is to open oneself completely, intimately, into the Presence that is beyond our ability to name.”
― Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

“The panther that has stalked you
since you were a child
is old now. No longer wild,
and tired of guarding the treasure
you yourself left behind -
blind and deaf, she will give it all to you
if you just let her go.”
― Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

“Maybe she is right. Maybe the old self has to die for the new self to be born. Or maybe, for me, the old self doesn’t have to die. Maybe who I have been is not erasable on the tablet of who I am, or in the book of who I will become. Maybe writing, like painting, can be pentimento—one layer over another, the early layers now and then showing through.”
― Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice