Tami Groth > Tami's Quotes

“Listen--are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?”
― Mary Oliver

“to live in this world

you must be able
to do three things
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go”
― Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Volume One

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”
― Mary Oliver

“Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy—the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.”
― Brene Brown

“That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.”
― Tim O'Brien

“Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“I survived, but it's not a happy ending.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end...”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“you're never more alive than when you're almost dead.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Fiction is the lie that helps us understand the truth.”
― Tim O'Brien

“And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It's about sunlight. It's about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It's about love and memory. It's about sorrow. It's about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.”
― Tim O'Brien

“But this too is true: stories can save us.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Well, right now I'm not dead. But when I am, it's like...I don't know, I guess it's like being inside a book that nobody's reading. [...] An old one. It's up on a library shelf, so you're safe and everything, but the book hasn't been checked out for a long, long time. All you can do is wait. Just hope somebody'll pick it up and start reading.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“A good piece of fiction, in my view, does not offer solutions. Good stories deal with our moral struggles, our uncertainties, our dreams, our blunders, our contradictions, our endless quest for understanding. Good stories do not resolve the mysteries of the human spirit but rather describe and expand up on those mysteries.”
― Tim O'Brien

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next.
Delicious Ambiguity.”
― Gilda Radner

“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”
― Philip Pullman

“It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Perhaps some day I'll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“A good story should make you laugh, and a moment later break your heart.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Stranger than Fiction

“Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds' eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks. Or they are words on the air, composed of sounds and ideas-abstract, invisible, gone once they've been spoken-and what could be more frail than that? But some stories, small, simple ones about setting out on adventures or people doing wonders, tales of miracles and monsters, have outlasted all the people who told them, and some of them have outlasted the lands in which they were created.”
― Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

“We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom.
We lived in the gaps between the stories.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Stories are light. Light is precious in a world so dark. Begin at the beginning. Tell Gregory a story. Make some light.”
― Kate DiCamillo, The Tale of Despereaux

“We owe it to each other to tell stories.”
― Neil Gaiman

“We must be careful with our lives, for Christ's sake, because it would seem that they are the only lives we are going to have in this puzzling and perilous world, and so they are very precious and what we do with them matters enormously.”
― Frederick Buechner

“Shame derives its power from being unspeakable. That’s why it loves perfectionists—it’s so easy to keep us quiet. If we cultivate enough awareness about shame to name it and speak to it, we’ve basically cut it off at the knees. Shame hates having words wrapped around it. If we speak shame, it begins to wither. Just the way exposure to light was deadly for the gremlins, language and story bring light to shame and destroy it.”
― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead