Quote

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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Brenda Ueland
Age: 93 †
Born: 1891
Born: October 24
Died: 1985
Died: March 5
Journalist
Mind
Radio
Something
Busy
Always
Listening
Reading
Talking
Unimportant
Easy
External
Next
Planning
Thing
Kept

More quotes by 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
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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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Inspiration comes to us slowly and quietly . prime it with a little solitude.
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Families are great murderers of the creative impulsive, particularly husbands.
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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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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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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 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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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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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
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Know that it is good to work. Work with love, and think of liking it when you do it. It is easy and interesting. It is a privilege. There is nothing hard about it but your anxious vanity and fear of failure.
Brenda Ueland
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The imagination needs moodling,--long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering.
Brenda Ueland
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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.
Brenda Ueland
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We start out in our lives as little children, full of light and the clearest vision.
Brenda Ueland
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Everyone knows how people who laugh easily create us by their laughter,--making us think of funnier and funnier things.
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 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.
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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...writing is not a performance but a generosity.
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