Leigh Newman famous quotes

Resisting and avoiding pain sucks energy-and time. The more you let yourself feel those minute-and-a-half hells, the quicker you'll start feeling those minute-and-a-half happinesses.
-- Leigh Newman

#Pain #Feelings #Energy

The most reliable path to glory is base brute effort.
-- Leigh Newman

#Effort #Path #Glory

While you can't keep your heart from getting broken, you can stop breaking your own heart...once you realize the difference between what you can control and what you can't, and that it's far, far more fun to lavish all that attention on your own self-worth.
-- Leigh Newman

#Fun #Heart #Self Worth

Most dreams are also part reality (otherwise we wouldn't believe them), and reality happens to be a condition that gives you plenty of chances through your life to rise to-no, soar through-the occasion.
-- Leigh Newman

#Dream #Believe #Reality

There are still things out there in the universe to contemplate and spend our lives chasing.
-- Leigh Newman

#Chasing #Contemplating #Stills

How do you stop longing for what you absolutely know you can't get? Which really means: How do you absolutely know you can't-and won't-get it, not ever? How do you pinch out that wisp of feeble, ruthless hope?
-- Leigh Newman

#Mean #Longing #Wisps

Penning an advice column for the literary website The Rumpus, [Strayed] worked anonymously, using the pen name Sugar, replying to letters from readings suffering everything from loveless marriages to abusive, drug-addicted brothers to disfiguring illnesses. The result: intimate, in-depth essays that not only took the letter writer's life into account but also Strayed's. Collected in a book, they make for riveting, emotionally charged reading (translation: be prepared to bawl) that leaves you significantly wiser for the experience. . . . Moving. . . . compassionate.
-- Leigh Newman

#Brother #Moving #Book

I've managed to create intimacy with people I know, and people that I don't know. The longer things stay inside of us, the more we think they are black or tainted, but they're really not.
-- Leigh Newman

#Thinking #People #Black

After the age of seven, I began living between my dad in Alaska and my mother in Baltimore. Every three or four months, I would fly the 5,000 miles between the two. And having grown up in Alaska, Baltimore was astonishing.
-- Leigh Newman

#Mother #Dad #Alaska

I made myself a rule: write out of love. And when you love somebody, you have to tell the truth about who they are - not the cute "truth" in your head of who they are, the one where you did everything right and they did everything wrong.
-- Leigh Newman

#Cute #Writing #Telling The Truth

I turned what was a wonderful case of self-reliance into a case of self-exile. Which is not uncommon, I think, in people who grow really early and have to learn how to take care of themselves. They have trouble hinging their lives with anybody else.
-- Leigh Newman

#Thinking #Self #People

I didn't write the memoir with any sort of intention of feeling better. I wrote the memoir because I had a weird need to write a good story. But once I was done, I did feel better about myself. Not better, just calmer. Because a tremendous onus had been lifted off my day-to-day.
-- Leigh Newman

#Writing #Feel Better #Feelings

When you're looking around for metaphor or simile, I do think it's often helpful to keep inside the world of the book, to gather your comparisons from the stuff particular to that world - be they king salmon and aviation fuel, or pot roasts and spatulas.
-- Leigh Newman

#Kings #Book #Thinking

You see things really different when your father is so intimately, so indisputably in charge of your continued existence on the planet.
-- Leigh Newman

#Father #Different #Planets

There's a kind of intimacy that happens between a mother and an only child. Which only gets more intimate when it's between a mother and only daughter.
-- Leigh Newman

#Daughter #Mother #Children

I would hit a scene about my mother screaming at me during her breakdown, drunk or using pills, and she'd turn into a monster. Which she wasn't. She was a human: somebody who loved me and somebody with a problem.
-- Leigh Newman

#Mother #Drunk #Monsters

If you want to write in a mature and interesting way, you have to have sympathy for everyone that's involved.
-- Leigh Newman

#Writing #Interesting #Mature

Maybe it's easier to think about dishonesty and what kind of trouble you can get into as a writer when love and honesty collide and you sidestep that collision, either because you want to protect somebody or you want to blame somebody - which are the usual impulses in love: protection and blame, frequently at the same time - so you don't exactly tell the truth.
-- Leigh Newman

#Honesty #Thinking #Usual

I don't think many kids question their surroundings. Everything seems so permanent and inevitable growing up, even chaos.
-- Leigh Newman

#Growing Up #Kids #Thinking

After my parents divorced, my father remarried and my brothers were born when I was twelve and sixteen. I was thunderstruck at these kids. The "baby-ness" of them. Their toes. I had never been around babies before.
-- Leigh Newman

#Baby #Brother #Father

Often, I think that my brothers were the reason I didn't do something really stupid in my teenage years; I didn't want to disappoint them. Even though was I was pretty committed to disappointing everybody else.
-- Leigh Newman

#Brother #Teenage #Stupid

Even as my family fell apart and things were at their most hopeless, my dad and I found a lot of happiness in the wilderness - sleeping on the cold gravel and killing as many things as we could get our hands on. Even as my mom got progressively more crazy, we found a happiness, in flashes.
-- Leigh Newman

#Mom #Dad #Crazy

There was always some germ of joy, some little paramecium of happiness wriggling around, waiting for a chance to get out.
-- Leigh Newman

#Joy #Waiting #Littles

The tough thing is how to cultivate a life where the paramecium of happiness gets a lot of chances to get out and swim and make more paramecia. That seems like an obvious universal goal for most humans.
-- Leigh Newman

#Goal #Swim #Chance