Quote

... 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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Brenda Ueland
Age: 93 †
Born: 1891
Born: October 24
Died: 1985
Died: March 5
Journalist
Really
Keep
Legged
Think
Three
Tied
Thinking
Two
Legs
People
Cannot
Fast
Seems
Grow
Power
Grows
Together
Alone
Made
Race
Tripping

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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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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Consistency is the horror of the world.
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Families are great murderers of the creative impulsive, particularly husbands.
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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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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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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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Be bold, free, and truthful.
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Duty should be a byproduct.
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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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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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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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Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express.
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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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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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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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.
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We start out in our lives as little children, full of light and the clearest vision.
Brenda Ueland