Quote

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.

Brenda Ueland

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Brenda Ueland
Age: 93 †
Born: 1891
Born: October 24
Died: 1985
Died: March 5
Journalist
Eyes
Poetic
Looking
Flowers
Eye
Trees
Death
Memory
May
Flower
Live
However
Mulch
Children
Tree
Passionately
Memories
Afterlife

More quotes by 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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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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the only way to become a better writer is to become a better person.
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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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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We start out in our lives as little children, full of light and the clearest vision.
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 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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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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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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... when I am really alone some power seems to grow in me. ... Conjugality made me think of a three-legged race, where two people cannot go fast and keep tripping each other because their two legs are tied together.
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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Families are great murderers of the creative impulsive, particularly husbands.
Brenda Ueland
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The imagination needs moodling,--long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering.
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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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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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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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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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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Inspiration comes to us slowly and quietly . prime it with a little solitude.
Brenda Ueland