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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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Brenda Ueland
Age: 93 †
Born: 1891
Born: October 24
Died: 1985
Died: March 5
Journalist
Good
Serious
Always
Start
Life
Fear
Inspirational
True
Truth
Something
Make
Afraid

More quotes by Brenda Ueland

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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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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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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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Be bold, free, and truthful.
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...writing is not a performance but a generosity.
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These people who are always briskly doing something and as busy as waltzing mice, they have little, sharp, staccato ideas, such as: I see where I can make an annual cut of $3.47 in my meat budget. But they have no slow, big ideas.
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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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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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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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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 imagination needs moodling,--long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering.
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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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Consistency is the horror of the world.
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the only way to become a better writer is to become a better person.
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Everyone knows how people who laugh easily create us by their laughter,--making us think of funnier and funnier things.
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You must become aware of the richness in you and come to believe in it and know it is there, so that you can write opulently and with self-trust. If you once become aware of it and have faith in it, you will be all right.
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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.
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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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Inspiration does not come like a blot, nor is it kinetic energy striving, but it comes to us slowly and quietly all the time.
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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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