Quotes by Nick Flynn

“Here's a secret: Everyone, if they live long enough, will lose their way at some point. You will lose your way, you will wake up one morning and find yourself lost. This is a hard, simple truth. If...”

“If it had been a heart attack, the newspaper,as if a mountain range had openedinside her, but instead, a light coming onin an empty room. The telephonefell from my shoulder, a black parrot repeatin...”

“Sometimes I'd see my father, walking past my building on his way to another nowhere. I could have given him a key, offered a piece of my floor. A futon. A bed. But I never did. If I let him inside ...”

“The South African artist William Kentridge speaks to this type of certainty: 'To say that one needs art, or politics, that incorporate ambiguity and contradiction is not to say that one then stops ...”

“Ive come to believe that the function of torture in our society is not about getting information, in spite of what we might want to believe. It is merely about power. It tells the world that there ...”

“(2002) In Rome, month upon month, I struggled with how to structure the book about my father (He already had the water, he just had to discover jars). At one point I laid each chapter out on the te...”

“Even a life raft is only supposed to get you from the sinking ship back to land, you were never intended to live in the life raft, to drift years on end, in sight of land but never close enough.”

“OUT of that moment Jesus was nailed to his cross flowed our attempts to represent it, to create a narrative that could contain it. Yet the body, hanging there, is still, simply, terrible. Caravaggi...”

“My friend asked me if it had been cathartic, to write my memoir. I looked down at the sculpturesit was cathartic for me to look at them, but I could imagine it might have been hell to make them (I ...”

“By the time I'm nine I know the world is a dangerous place. I've heard whispers about razorblades in apples, about Charlie Manson and his family. But no one is offering any clear information.”

“You do know, right,that between the no-longer & the still-to-comeyou are being continuallytattooed, inkedwith the skulls ofeveryoneyouve ever lovedthe you& the you& the you & the youyou dontsit in ...”

“I was unable to throw myself in the ocean, she writes, the handwriting more erratic as the painkillers seep into every cell, shutting out lights in empty rooms.”

“What I was trying to say, maybe, is that I don't know what it is I'm capable of transforming into.”

“I know cigarettes can kill & wonder why she wants to die.”

“If it had been a heart attack, the new”

“But what of Ham? It didnt matter if he told anyone about his drunken father or not, if he chided him or tried to dress him, if he lifted his struggling body back into bed, if he took his hand and t...”

“When my grandmother comes to dinner at our house she always carries her own jar of Turners Special Blend. She knows how much she needs and doesnt want to be caught short. My brother remembers her a...”

“Its the way I walk through the world, carrying that fear, that the beloved will go, will die, and that I will be the one to blame.”

“If you're going to write about someone's life, you don't just use them for wallpaper. You have to honor and respect that life.”

“OUT of that moment Jesus was nailed to his cross flowed our attempts to represent it, to create a narrative that could contain it. Yet the body, hanging there, is still, simply, terrible. Caravaggi...”