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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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Brenda Ueland
Age: 93 †
Born: 1891
Born: October 24
Died: 1985
Died: March 5
Journalist
Think
However
Thinking
Opinion
People
Open
Best
Ideas
Stern
Better
Resolute
Trying
Kindly
Always
Boss

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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.
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Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express.
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Be bold, free, and truthful.
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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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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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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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the only way to become a better writer is to become a better person.
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Consistency is the horror of the world.
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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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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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...writing is not a performance but a generosity.
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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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Of course, in fairness, I must remind you of this: that we writers are the most lily-livered of all craftsmen. We expect more, for the most peewee efforts, than any other people.
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If you write, good ideas must come welling up into you so that you have something to write. If good ideas do not come at once, or for a long time, do not be troubled at all. Wait for them. Put down little ideas no matter how insignificant they are. But do not feel, any more, guilty about idleness and solitude.
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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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Everyone knows how people who laugh easily create us by their laughter,--making us think of funnier and funnier things.
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Write a true, careless, slovenly impulsive, honest diary every day of your life.
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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.
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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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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.
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