Beth Kephart Quotes
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Forgiveness, which is the place that every story turns, the chance we give each other.
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You know how a river goes on and on? That's my love for you.
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How do you know when an apology is true—when it means something, or can change something, or will last outside the moment?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Nobody knows (for real, for true) how hard someone is trying.
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Throughout our lives friends enclose us like pairs of parentheses. They shift our boundaries; crater our terrain. They fume through the cracks of our tentative houses and parts of them always remain. Friendship asks the truth and wants the truth, hollows and fills, ages with us, and we through it. It cradles us like family. It is ecology and mystery and language - all three. Our grown-up friendships - especially the really meaningful ones- model for our children what we want them to have throughout their lives.
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Maybe all that matters is that they love each other, still, the way people who have known each other will always love each other.
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Beauty is the worst kind of lie.
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Nothing erodes a mother's love. It is not sand on a beach. It is the nuclear heart of things-hard as the rock of this earth.
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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.
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We grow too old to lose old friends.
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I believe friends enclose us, like a pair of parentheses. Each one knows us differently, each sustains us in a different way.
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Love is what you give and love is what you want and love is how you wait, but it doesn't save you.
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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?
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Words are the weights which hold our history in place.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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Were there language, I'd be my own lone letter.
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In high school, my desire for friendship far outweighed my talent for it.
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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.