3 Quotes & Sayings By Rita Golden Gelman

Rita Golden Gelman is the author of five bestselling novels and a memoir, The Other Side of Sadness: A Memoir of Grief and Grace. Her fiction has been published in over twenty languages and translated into multiple languages. She is the recipient of an NEA fellowship in fiction and a Whiting Writers' Award. Her work has been honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the National Book Critics Circle, the PEN Center USA West, and the American Library Association Read more

She was a founding editor of Tin House magazine. Golden Gelman is a 2017 Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

1
My spirit gets nourished in faraway places. Sometimes I wonder if it's a biological need, perhaps a biological flaw, that compels me to seek the excitement and challenge that comes of being in a place where nobody knows me. Other times I think that my compulsion to settle into communities that are different from the ones I know is related to my passion for experiential learning. I learn best and most happily by doing, touching, sharing, tasting. When I'm somewhere I've never been before, learning goes on all day, every day. Rita Golden Gelman
2
But I'm not running away. I'm running toward.. toward adventure, toward discovery, toward diversity. And while I was in Mexico I discovered something intruiging: Once I leave the U.S., I am not bound by the rules of my culture. And when I am a foreigner in another country, I am exempt from the local rules. This extraordinary situation means that there are no rules in my life. I am free to live by the standards and ideals and rules I create for myself. . Rita Golden Gelman