Jules Feiffer Quotes

When it comes to heartbreaks and disappointments, I often have to be more or less done with them to be able to write about them. Then you might ask why I would write about them at all, but I think I owe it to the Jens of the past.

I started blogging in 2004, light years ago on the Web. And I began because I have this handicap - I can't figure out my life or see God clearly unless I untangle my life again with words.

Even if something within me is ugly, writing is a pretty good place to play with that thing and to begin to really see it.

Everyone has a past, but that's just it--it's in the past. You can learn from it, but you can't change it.

Unless you're very boring, I think most people who've lived long enough have something in their past which will never go away. As a writer, my interest has become in writing about much more emotional, personal topics. I'm trying to reach into subjects I have never written about before.

We have to make myths of our lives, the point being that if we do, then every grief or inexplicable seizure by weather, woe, or work can-if we discipline ourselves and think hard enough-be turned to account, be made to yield further insight into what it is to be alive, to be a human being.

I was generally busy from 7 A.M. until midnight. I never had time to sit and think. As I worked, physical and mental fatigue set in and I was unable to operate to the maximum of my intellectual ability. But in a single cell in prison, I had time to think. I had a clear view of my past and present, and I found that my past left much to be desired, both in regard to my relations with other humans and in developing personal worth.

A man is a fool who sits looking backward from himself in the past. Ah, what shallow, vain conceit there is in man! Forget the things that are behind. That is not where you live. Your roots are not there. They are in the present; and you should reach up into the other life.

You make PEACE with your past by owning your PIECE of the past.

There's the life you live and the life you leave behind. but what you share with someone else - especially someone you love - that's not just how you bury your past. It's how you write you future.

Which is strange - I've always thought of myself as someone who writes out of difficulty. And I did do that, but I came out on the side of light more often than not.

I am ashamed every day, and more ashamed the next. But I will spend the rest of my life in this living space writing these notes, this journal, recording my acts and reflections, finding some honor, some worth at the bottom of things. I want ten thousand pages that will stop the world.

Sometimes we have to soak ourselves in the tears and fears of the past to water our future gardens.

After all, memory may be the only thing on earth we can truly manipulate to serve us, so we don't have to look back at ourselves in the receding past and think, What an arsehole!

Remember that the writing itself is good for you. If your story is so close to home that you are afraid to write it, it probably means you need to write it.

If I have gained anything over these months, it is the knowledge there is no starting over- only living with the mistakes you've made.

It so often happens that others are measuring us by our past self while we are looking back on that self with a mixture of disgust and sorrow.

To deny our pasts is to burn the bridge we must cross to self-understanding.

I do think that just about whenever I am writing, or more accurately, whenever I have written, I feel better and more at peace as a human being. That doesn't mean, unfortunately, that the literary product is any good.

I was of the opinion that the past is past, and like all that is not now it should remain buried along the side of our memories.

We cannot erase the past, but we can accept it as history.

Don't be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen. Otherwise it will be too easy for you to look with blame... at your past, which naturally has a share with everything that now meets you.

Writing is medicine. It is an appropriate antidote to injury. It is an appropriate companion for any difficult change.

I have begun writing what I have said I'd never write, a memoir ("I am not my own subject," I used to say with icy superiority).

Such honesty comes with a price, but when you get past the hurt and shock of realizing that you're faulted and frequently wrong, you also realize that you are really loved and respected for who you are, and you become a better person.