Jack Bowman Quotes

One of the nice things about writing is you can take essentially painful things in your life and turn them into something that might be useful, or at least entertaining, to somebody else.

That's what I enjoy most about my music - that it heals in its own time and makes us look at ourselves in its own time.

A lot of people say they want to get out of pain, and I'm sure that's true, but they aren't willing to make healing a high priority. They aren't willing to look inside to see the source of their pain in order to deal with it.

Too many people have been analyzing their pasts, their childhoods, their memories, their parents, and realizing that it doesn't do anything-or that it doesn't do enough.

Writing is a way of processing our lives. And it can be a way of healing.

I always find out after the fact that the books I've been writing were actually some sort of therapy, some sort of, you know, self-examination that I had to write the book in order to complete.

It is the only thing we can do. Each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others. And remember that every atom of hate that we add to this world makes it sill more inhospitable

Recording happiness made it last longer, we felt, and recording sorrow dramatized it and took away its bitterness; and often we settled some problem which beset us even while we wrote about it.

Inner disarmament, external disarmament; these must go together, you see. Peace is not just mere absence of violence - genuine peace must start in each individual heart.

One writes not to be read but to breathe...one writes to think, to pray, to analyze. One writes to clear one's mind, to dissipate one's fears, to face one's doubts, to look at one's mistakes--in order to retrieve them. One writes to capture and crystallize one's joy, but also to disperse one's gloom. Like prayer--you go to it in sorrow more than joy, for help, a road back to 'grace'.

I knew A.J. Muste very well. I tried for a while to be like he was, and that is a total pacifist. But then Margot [my wife] hit me hard in the stomach one day to prove to me that I wasn't as perfect a pacifist as I thought I was.

I thought the best thing that I could do would be to clean up my own act, in terms of whatever .. childhood wounds were left.

Paintings helped to change my life. I'd still be living a life of disaster without it.

Writing a journal means that facing your ocean you are afraid to swim across it, so you attempt to drink it drop by drop.

It is not possible to be honest in the here and now when you continue to discount and minimize your childhood experiences.

To fashion an inner story of our pain carries us into the heart of it, which is where rebirth inevitably occurs.

I think there are so many children being brought up in some form of violence, be it violence of poverty or sexism or racism or homophobia or transphobia. That violence takes a life to transform or overcome. I don't think people should be spending their lives dealing with that. I think people should be thriving, playing, creating, evolving.

Nothing but the heart can change the heart.

I was going through troubles with my marriage, and I was just trying to focus and center myself. I was already rich and famous. I've got to figure out where I want to go and just get this thing aimed. I wrote this song ["Right Now"] and I kept singing it every day .

As you become more conscious of your cruelty, of your violence, gross and subtle, you start becoming more and more compassionate. Not that you cultivate compassion. Just by becoming aware of your cruelty, violence, ugliness... the very awareness brings new changes in you. And the energy that was involved in cruelty, in violence, starts changing. The same energy becomes purified, the same energy becomes compassion.

I was a very violent kid. I think movies and writing and art have been a way of channeling this. But I have will to defend people - it can be all sorts of people.

Part of you just has to be in service of processing things and getting them out.

Fighting has opened the path to redemption for me.

I feel like I'm getting closer and closer to myself with time, not only in terms of my career choices, but the choices I make within one role or performance. I used to compose characters that were farther from me, but I find now that I like to craft a subtle composition, a subtle change in your essence.