Anne Fadiman Quotes

Even as a child, even as my blood-past was drained from me, I understood that if I were strong enough to accept it, I was being offered a second history.

I have had to experience so much stupidity, so many vices, so much error, so much nausea, disillusionment and sorrow, just in order to become a child again and begin anew. I had to experience despair, I had to sink to the greatest mental depths, to thoughts of suicide, in order to experience grace.

I think my children have presented one of the biggest lessons so far in my life. It was only when my kids were born that I realized just how much I'd been living my life worried about what everybody thought of me and, even more strangely, worried about what I imagined other people might be thinking about me.

I had seen these transformations, people who had lost their will to live, coming back from their zombie states and radiating a new life force from their eyes.

Having kids sets a bomb off in your life. It really makes you examine who you are, what you believe in and what you want to be. And that is magical for creativity.

Anything I've done up till May 27th 1999 was kind of an illusion, existing without living. My daughter, the birth of my daughter, gave me life.

There's something really magical about having a child - it's like permission to begin again, start over, reevaluate some things, check yourself. Recognize yourself.

The thing about Duran... that gives you the ability to bring all that opportunity back into your life.

Having children is my greatest achievement. It was my saviour. It switched my focus from the outside to the inside. My children are gifts, they remind me of what's important.

In the last few years, losing my father, going through a divorce and not getting some jobs I really wanted, is making me a much more interesting person, I think. This all really does feel like a rebirth, a new chapter.

I guess I'm in a state of becoming. Even though I've had a full career and I've been around a long time, it's like dinosaurs are coming back. It's all new. I'm having to be on my own and seeing how exciting life can be now.

A lot changed when I had Natasha. I'm a survivor.

I felt like I really came into my own when I became a mom. My entire world changed.

My children are, without question, the most wonderful thing. I've learnt more about myself through my children than any other experience in my life.

For me, 'Resurrected' is just like I'm saying, 'I'm still here; I'm still having fun, and I'm still going.'

You can be shattered, and then you can put yourself back together piece by piece. But what can happen over time is this: You wake up one day and realize that you have put yourself back together completely differently. That you are whole, finally, and strong - but you are now a different shape, a different size.

Of course if you like your kids, if you love them from the moment they begin, you yourself begin all over again, in them, with them, and so there is something more to the world again.

I feel different. You know this many times over, because you are a parent, but it transforms you. It's this incredible experience where, in one way, you are still very much yourself, and in some ways you become even more connected to the rest of yourself. All of a sudden, you just get more connected to your child self, and your teenage self, and all these selves that you've maybe been abandoning at every date post that you pass.

I think one of the reasons we have children is to believe everything all over again. And I'm not talking Santa, here, either.

Think of a lifeless forest in which a small plant pushes its head upward, out of the ruin. In our grief process, we are moving into life from death, without denying the devastation that came before.

Think of a crucible as an occasion for real magic, the creation of something more valuable than an alchemist could possibly imagine. In it, the individual is transformed, changed, created anew. He or she grows in ways that change his or her definition of self.

How do you plan a rebirth? I'm not sure you do. You just stand in the darkness until you can't endure it any long, and then you move forward until you're standing in the light.

I do think that the birth of my daughter was sort of a rebirth for me. It made me look at life in a completely new way. And that made me appreciate life in a way I don't think I ever had before.

The grief and tears didn't wash me away. They gave me my life back! They cleansed me, baptized me, hydrated the earth at my feet.

From every ruin, life springs up again and everything that dies is born again.