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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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Brenda Ueland
Age: 93 †
Born: 1891
Born: October 24
Died: 1985
Died: March 5
Journalist
Life
Taking
Everybody
Process
Else
Two
Sometimes
Think
Peg
Thinking
Discouraging

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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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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.
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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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Everyone knows how people who laugh easily create us by their laughter,--making us think of funnier and funnier things.
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the only way to become a better writer is to become a better person.
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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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...writing is not a performance but a generosity.
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Families are great murderers of the creative impulsive, particularly husbands.
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Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express.
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Inspiration comes to us slowly and quietly . prime it with a little solitude.
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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.
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We are always afraid to start something that we want to make very good, true, and serious.
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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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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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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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The imagination needs moodling,--long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering.
Brenda Ueland
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Consistency is the horror of the world.
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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
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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