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The imagination needs moodling,--long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering.

Brenda Ueland

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Brenda Ueland
Age: 93 †
Born: 1891
Born: October 24
Died: 1985
Died: March 5
Journalist
Idling
Inefficient
Creativity
Imagination
Happiness
Happy
Needs
Long
Dawdling

More quotes by Brenda Ueland

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We should all know this: that listening, not talking, is the gifted and great role, and the imaginative role.
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Self-trust is so important. When you launch on a story, make your neck loose, feel free, good-natured. And be lazy. Feel that you are going to throw it away. Try writing utterly unplanned stories and see what comes out.
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You have to hold your audience in writing to the very end-much more than in talking, when people have to be polite and listen to you.
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it is when you are really living in the present-working, thinking, lost, absorbed in something you care about very much, that you are living spiritually.
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The writer has a feeling and utters it from his true self. The reader reads it and is immediately infected and has exactly the same feeling. This is the whole secret of enchantment and fascination.
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Why should we all use our creative power....? Because there is nothing that makes people so generous, joyful, lively, bold and compassionate, so indifferent to fighting and the accumulation of objects and money.
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Who are the people, for example, to whom you go for advice? Not to the hard, practical ones who can tell you exactly what to do, but to the listeners that is, the kindest, least censorious, least bossy people you know. It is because by pouring out your problem to them, you then know what to do about it yourself.
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Sometimes I think of life as a process where everybody is discouraging and taking everybody else down a peg or two.
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The tragedy of bold, forthright, industrious people is that they act so continuously without much thinking, that it becomes dry and empty.
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You Do Not Know Is in You— an Inexhaustible Fountain of Ideas. Another reason for writing a diary is to discover that the ideas in you are an inexhaustible fountain.
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Don't always be appraising yourself, wondering if you are better or worse than other writers. I will not Reason and Compare, said Blake my business is to Create. Besides, since you are like no other being ever created since the beginning of Time, you are incomparable.
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We are always afraid to start something that we want to make very good, true, and serious.
Brenda Ueland
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Write a true, careless, slovenly impulsive, honest diary every day of your life.
Brenda Ueland
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... when I am really alone some power seems to grow in me. ... Conjugality made me think of a three-legged race, where two people cannot go fast and keep tripping each other because their two legs are tied together.
Brenda Ueland
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Consistency is the horror of the world.
Brenda Ueland
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the only way to become a better writer is to become a better person.
Brenda Ueland
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Science and vivisection make no appeal to a theological idea, much less a political one. You can argue with a theologian or a politician, but doctors are sacrosanct. They know you do not. Science has its mystique much more powerful than any religion active today.
Brenda Ueland
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The only good teachers for you are those friends who love you, who think you are interesting, or very important, or wonderfully funny.
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No writing is a waste of time – no creative work where the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work. With every sentence you write, you have learned something. It has done you good.
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Duty should be a byproduct.
Brenda Ueland