Quote

If you would shut your door against the children for an hour a day and say: 'Mother is working on her five-act tragedy in blank verse!' you would be surprised how they would respect you. They would probably all become playwrights.

Brenda Ueland

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Brenda Ueland
Age: 93 †
Born: 1891
Born: October 24
Died: 1985
Died: March 5
Journalist
Working
Shut
Hours
Tragedy
Mother
Hour
Playwrights
Become
Door
Verse
Children
Doors
Playwright
Would
Respect
Verses
Probably
Blank
Five
Surprised

More quotes by Brenda Ueland

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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.
Brenda Ueland
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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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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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Families are great murderers of the creative impulsive, particularly husbands.
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Write a true, careless, slovenly impulsive, honest diary every day of your life.
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Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. When we really listen to people there is an alternating current, and this recharges us so that we never get tired of each other. We are constantly being re-created.
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.
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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
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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.
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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Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express.
Brenda Ueland
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Advertising companies hire the very brightest, wittiest young people to write for them. Not one single sentence of it is worth repeating. Why? Because it wasn't meant.
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.
Brenda Ueland
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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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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.
Brenda Ueland
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Think of yourself as incandescent power, illuminated perhaps and forever talked to by God and his messengers.
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.
Brenda Ueland
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Consistency is the horror of the world.
Brenda Ueland
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We are always doing something, talking, reading, listening to the radio, planning what next. The mind is kept naggingly busy on some easy, unimportant external thing all day.
Brenda Ueland
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And the true listener is much more beloved, magnetic than the talker, and he is more effective and learns more and does more good
Brenda Ueland