Beth Kephart > Quotes

“Have you ever watched a leaf leave a tree? It falls upward first, and then it drifts toward the ground, just as I find myself drifting towards you.”
― Beth Kephart, Undercover

“Forgiveness, which is the place that every story turns, the chance we give each other.”
― Beth Kephart, Undercover

“How do you know when an apology is true—when it means something, or can change something, or will last outside the moment?”
― Beth Kephart, Undercover

“Step out from behind the words. When you're a writer you can imagine that the words speak for you and are you, but they're not. You are this living breathing bad hair day kind of person.”
― Beth Kephart

“You know how a river goes on and on? That's my love for you.”
― Beth Kephart, Undercover

“Here’s another change I’ve noticed: The dark is more than the sun dropping off, more than the moon and the stars. It’s what you can’t see that you hope you will see, what hasn’t been that might be.”
― Beth Kephart

“The night before, I'd gone overboard with my Lila poems, and maybe it's true that I was hoping that in them he'd see the genius of me, the beauty of my words in his hands.”
― Beth Kephart, Undercover

“I hold to fiction as a cure, or partial cure, or cause for hope, or essential distraction from the rain you wake up to, the doubts in your head, the daily desolation that you have not yet said what is most true, you have not yet crafted the story that reveals you. And therefore something waits. Therefore you must wake and you must write and you are not alone.

Your fiction is with you.”
― Beth Kephart

“I’d thought he was stars and then I’d thought he was a fox. I had thought I’d been alone, but I hadn’t.”
― Beth Kephart, Undercover

“Fox-Trot

By the stream the fox and she-fox stood
Nose to nose beneath the stars
Dancing the music of the woods.

The deer rapped a beat with their hooves,
The ravens sang from raven hearts
As by the stream the fox and she-fox stood.

The great owl called as a great owl would,
The squirrels all shimmied in the dark,
Dancing the music of the woods.

Then from the north a fierce wind blew
And broke the starry dance apart
By the stream where the fox and she-fox stood.”
― Beth Kephart, Undercover

“Beauty is the worst kind of lie.”
― Beth Kephart, Undercover

“You aren't happy," Estela says.
"I can't be happy," I say.
"Look at me, Kenzie."
"I'm looking at you, Estela."
"Do you know your own heart?"
"I don't know anything."
"Go," she says, "and think. And don't come back until you know.”
― Beth Kephart, Small Damages

“Nature is not the number-one mystery, I’ve learned. It’s the heart that takes top honors.”
― Beth Kephart, Undercover

“Were there language, I'd be my own lone letter.”
― Beth Kephart

“Maybe all that matters is that they love each other, still, the way people who have known each other will always love each other.”
― Beth Kephart, Small Damages

“I’d have given any- thing to know how Mom and Dad were, but you can’t ask your parents such questions. You have to wait for them to tell you what it is that will happen next...”
― Beth Kephart, Undercover

“Imagine music gushing down the hollow places in your bones, and making you liquid, and giving you speed. Imagine music turning your body into a song.”
― Beth Kephart, Undercover

“His client needs him, he says. Needs him? But isn’t he needed at home?”
― Beth Kephart, Undercover

“Empathy smartens you”
― Beth Kephart, Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir

“When I was a boy, that was all I wanted—to grow a pair of wings and get up into the sky. I had a basement full of failed wing projects. Boards and capes and motors, even a pile of found feathers I once tried to glue together with a bottle of Elmer’s; you should have seen your grandmother’s face. But I never got any higher than the backyard fence I’d launch from. I never got inside a cloud. Your raven did.”
― Beth Kephart, Undercover

“You obsess (but of course you obsess) until the joy is gone from that thing you'd loved, until your fury overwhelms your passion, until you no longer know how to sit with your back against a tree and write poetry that no one will ever see.”
― Beth Kephart, Ghosts in the Garden: Reflections on Endings, Beginnings, and the Unearthing of Self

“Nobody knows (for real, for true) how hard someone is trying.”
― Beth Kephart, This Is the Story of You

“There is the who they thought they were and the who they wrote down, the something lost and the something gained, the discrepancy, now easily measured, between the voice they hear in their heads and the voice they find on their paper. “Our notebooks give us away,” Joan Didion observes. And they do. They also provide, to memoir makers, a shelf and a foundation,”
― Beth Kephart, Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir

“When I ask my students to journal daily, I ask them not to judge and not to filter. Just put it down, I say—whatever you think of, however you want. A week goes by, and I send along a copy of Joan Didion’s short, classic essay “On Keeping a Notebook.” Write three paragraphs about the notebook pages that you have been keeping, I say. What is the value of the notes you have kept? What did they teach you about yourself? How honest are the pages, and what do you expect they will mean to you ten or twenty years from now? What shouts back at you about your voice and the sentences you leave behind?”
― Beth Kephart, Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir

“Teaching memoir is teaching vulnerability is teaching voice is teaching self.”
― Beth Kephart, Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir

“Anna would say that she was a cat like Gemma, with nine lives to spend, all nine precious and delicious.”
― Beth Kephart, Dangerous Neighbors

“Memoir is a fixative. Put the life on the page, and there the life is. She will forever be running home across the creek. She will send (and again send) her uncle raw and banged-up poems. She will marry the exotic man and relentlessly fear her own unexotica. She will raise her only child with implacable regret and she will keep wishing she had done better, she had done more. She will despair here, honor that, leave the rest of everything absent. Her I becoming a you becoming a we becoming a she becoming her version, and from here on out she will represent that version, she will speak on its behalf, and through it.”
― Beth Kephart, Wife | Daughter | Self: A Memoir in Essays

“But listen: The weight of the camera reminds me to see. It helps me decide against deciding that my world is overly familiar, already known. I look for cracks and fissures, for the new or newly announced. I look for water to run a different color in the stream, or for the sun to strike the pond in winter with delirious force. If I can’t see, then I don’t know, and if I don’t know, I’m not writing, and while some may question the value of words, or of memoir in particular, I will again make this claim: Words rendered true spook and spur us. They expect of us. They expect for us. Photographs do the same thing: “Your photography is a record of your living, for anyone who really sees,” said Paul Strand.”
― Beth Kephart, Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir

“Love is what you give and love is what you want and love is how you wait, but it doesn't save you”
― Beth Kephart, Going Over

“Use your imagination as an arrow hurtling back toward what might have been or will never be.”
― Beth Kephart, Wife | Daughter | Self: A Memoir in Essays