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If I did not wear torn pants, orthopedic shoes, frantic disheveled hair, that is to say, if I did not tone down my beauty, people would go mad. Married men would run amuck.

Brenda Ueland

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Brenda Ueland
Age: 93 †
Born: 1891
Born: October 24
Died: 1985
Died: March 5
Journalist
People
Shoes
Disheveled
Wear
Orthopedics
Married
Orthopedic
Hair
Frantic
Beauty
Torn
Running
Pants
Would
Tone
Men
Mad

More quotes by Brenda Ueland

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You can write anything you want to,--a six-act blank verse, symbolic tragedy or a vulgar short, short story. Just so that you write it with honesty and gusto, and do not try to make somebody believe that you are smarter than you are. What's the use? You can never be smarter than you are.
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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Think of yourself as incandescent power, illuminated perhaps and forever talked to by God and his messengers.
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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.
Brenda Ueland
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The imagination needs moodling,--long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering.
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Write a true, careless, slovenly impulsive, honest diary every day of your life.
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I know that we live after death and again and again, not in the memory of our children, or as a mulch for trees and flowers, however poetic that may be, but looking passionately and egocentrically out of our eyes.
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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.
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People who try to boss themselves always want (however kindly) to boss other people. They always think they know best and are so stern and resolute about it they are not very open to new and better ideas.
Brenda Ueland
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Of course, in fairness, I must remind you of this: that we writers are the most lily-livered of all craftsmen. We expect more, for the most peewee efforts, than any other people.
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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.
Brenda Ueland
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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.
Brenda Ueland
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it is only by expressing all that is inside that purer and purer streams come. ... Pour out the dull things on paper too-you can tear them up afterward-for only then do the bright ones come. If you hold back the dull things, you are certain to hold back what is clear and beautiful and true and lively.
Brenda Ueland
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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.
Brenda Ueland
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The only way to write well, so that people believe what we say and are interested or touched by it, is to slough off all pretentiousness and attitudinizing.
Brenda Ueland
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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.
Brenda Ueland
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Inspiration comes to us slowly and quietly . prime it with a little solitude.
Brenda Ueland
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Duty should be a byproduct.
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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.
Brenda Ueland
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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.
Brenda Ueland