Donald Davis Quotes

A person's tragedy does not make up their entire life. A story carves deep grooves into our brains each time we tell it. But we aren't one story. We can change our stories. We can write our own.

We are the hero of our own story.

Maybe I'm not the right person to do it... but I've learned that I have some power to help stories be told the way they naturally need to be told.

You can write your own history.

When you take charge of your own narrative, it gives you a handle on it.

But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget. You take your material where you find it, which is in your life, at the intersection of past and present. The memory-traffic feeds into a rotary up on your head, where it goes in circles for a while, then pretty soon imagination flows in and the traffic merges and shoots off down a thousand different streets. As a writer, all you can do is pick a street and go for the ride, putting things down as they come at you. That's the real obsession. All those stories.

It's only a story, you say. So it is, and the rest of life with it - creation story, love story, horror, crime, the strange story of you and I. The alphabet of my DNA shapes certain words, but the story is not told. I have to tell it myself. What is it that I have to tell myself again and again? That there is always a new beginning, a different end. I can change the story. I am the story. Begin.

We all love narratives where we're the captain of our boat, and Americans love them more than anybody else.

La guerre, la guerre, everything la guerre. That's how I grew up. So for me, it's real. It's not something in the past.

Power is knowing your past.

To come from no voice, no power, and to be able to achieve what I have means that only my own personal vision holds me back.

The past does not influence me; I influence it.

You can use your story, or your story can use you.

Rich people believe 'I create my life.' Poor people believe 'Life happens to me.'

You can reclaim your own narrative.

I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off.

My top priority is for people to understand that they have the power to change things themselves.

I need not wait for I have the power to choose my own destiny.

I do not feel any less of a woman. I feel empowered that I made a strong choice that in no way diminishes my femininity.

Our past may explain why we're suffering but we must not use it as an excuse to stay in bondage.

I would like to suggest to you that you 'grab life by the horns' and do not let life grab you by the horns. You take control of your lives. Do not let life control you. Take charge. Rise to the divinity that is within you.

I am not a historian. I am a writer obsessed with remembering, with remembering the past

If people don't think they have the power to solve their problems, they won't even think about how to solve them.

Fiction cannot recite the numbing numbers, but it can be that witness, that memory. A storyteller can attempt to tell the human tale, can make a galaxy out of the chaos, can point to the fact that some people survived even as most people died. And can remind us that the swallows still sing around the smokestacks.

Nobody gives you power. Real power is something you take.