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" To be honest, in my five years as an electrician, I never got the license. "
Nick Flynn
Electrician
Years
Never
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" For years before I became a father, I would try to spend as much time as I could with my friends who were parents and their kids. And I was really impressed. They all sort of managed to do it, and do it gracefully. "
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Who
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" I believe poetry has very little to do with memory. "
Nick Flynn
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Very
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" What I do is write, and I try to write as closely as I can into what I call 'the mystery.' "
Nick Flynn
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Mystery
" That soldiers do terrible things during wartime should not surprise us. "
Nick Flynn
Surprise
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" When I was a child, writing was the worst possible choice of a career in my family. "
Nick Flynn
Family
Choice
Writing
" There's this sort of male energy that we have that can seem very destructive. But it doesn't have to be. It actually can be a very positive force. "
Nick Flynn
Force
Energy
Positive
" You come to realize people are not simple. "
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Simple
Realize
People
" On a good day I write, all day. "
Nick Flynn
Good Day
Good
Write
" I can weep pretty easily. I can get tears in my eyes from a beautiful work of art. "
Nick Flynn
Art
Beautiful
Tears
" That Dick Cheney is pro-torture surprises no one; he freely admits it. "
Nick Flynn
Freely
Surprises
He
" Change is one of the only constants in Buddhism; as meditation became the way I breathed in the days, this became apparent. "
Nick Flynn
Way
Days
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" In life you get one take, and it's perfect. It's strange, afterwards you might think I shouldn't have reacted that way, but that's the way you reacted. That's your take; that's all you get. "
Nick Flynn
Perfect
Way
You
" Certain stories we carry with us, events in our life, they define who we are. It's not a matter of getting over anything; we have to make the best of it. "
Nick Flynn
Matter
Best
Carry
" For the first few months, I was a comically inept parent. The first night home from the hospital, I held her bare body against my bare chest until a friend who was a doctor came by and asked what I was doing, and told me to put some clothes on that baby. "
Nick Flynn
Baby
Home
Doctor
" The attention one gets from being a poet isn't great. "
Nick Flynn
Being
Poet
Great
" I became an electrician after high school. But I always had this thing in me to write. But it was always a little shameful. To say you were a poet was saying you were kind of crazy, and I carried that around for a long time. I still kind of carry that. And I think it might be true, actually. "
Nick Flynn
Me
Think
Time
" I'm not sure why working at a homeless shelter made sense to me, except that I needed to immerse myself in some sort of larger real-life situation to get me out of the cage of my mind, in some ways. "
Nick Flynn
Homeless
Myself
Situation
" In life you get one take, and it's perfect. "
Nick Flynn
You
Get
Life
" That's the thing about a book: You're in the public life for a little bit, and then you sort of go away for a little while - several years, in my case - and then you come out again, hopefully. "
Nick Flynn
Away
You
Go
" The only strategy I know of is to write every day, which I don't always do, because sometimes I just can't, for various reasons that seem out of my control. "
Nick Flynn
Strategy
Day
Control
" I'd always imagined that one day I would be a father, but mostly it was off my radar. I admired friends who had somehow figured out how to cross that threshold. "
Nick Flynn
Day
One Day
Friends
" I get inspired by my friends, and if a friend is a writer, that is even deeper. "
Nick Flynn
Even
Writer
Inspired
" Everything we do, I'd imagine, influences everything we will do. "
Nick Flynn
Influences
Everything
Will
" Our job as writers, as far as I can tell, is to attempt to express what seems inexpressible. "
Nick Flynn
Seems
Tell
Our
" 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. "
Nick Flynn
Honor
You
Someone
" I had to steel myself against this psychic devastation - to see your father on the street. It's hard enough to pick up somebody you don't know from the streets, and then to actually have other people pick your father up - it was psychically devastating. "
Nick Flynn
See
Father
Know
" My father had always identified himself as a writer to my mother when they met. When they met, he was writing this great novel, there was no doubt about it. Part of why she left him was this delusion of greatness and identifying it very directly with being an artist. "
Nick Flynn
Greatness
Great
Father
" 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. "
Nick Flynn
Yourself
Live
Morning
" It takes an entire book to tell you what it was like. To see Robert De Niro play your father - it's not a simple answer. To see Julianne Moore play your mother. To see Paul Dano play you - that's an even more inscrutable question... he's amazing, he's totally amazing, but I can't really say if he's a good me or not. "
Nick Flynn
Mother
Good
Book