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Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you.

David Whyte

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David Whyte
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: September 21
Film Actor
Film Director
Film Producer
Poet
Stage Actor
Television Actor
Marrickville
New South Wales
Australia
Small
Anyone
Aloneness
Suffering
Confinement
Learn
Darkness
Doe
Sweet
Anything
Bring
Sometimes
Takes
Alive

More quotes by David Whyte

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The greatest tragedy is to live out someone else's life thinking it was your own.
David Whyte
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Those who will not slip beneath the still surface on the well of grief turning downward through it s black water to the place we cannot breathe will never know the source from which we drink, the secret water, cold and clear, nor find in the darkness glimmering the small round coins thrown by those who wished for something else.
David Whyte
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I want to know if you are willing to live, day by day, with the consequence of love.
David Whyte
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Honesty is reached through the doorway of grief and loss.
David Whyte
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A good poem has its own life. It's like bringing a child into the world. You, the poet, birthed the child, but the child will surprise you continually. I think a work of art has its own aliveness, its own future.
David Whyte
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But what would that be like feeling the tide rise out of the numbness inside
David Whyte
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We withdraw not to disappear, but to find another ground from which to see a solid ground from which to step, and from which to speak again, in a different way, a clear, rested, embodied voice we begin to remember again as our own.
David Whyte
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In England especially, poetry's woven into the background fabric of society. And in Ireland, it's in the foreground. The place of the poet in Irish society is enormous. If you say you're a poet in Ireland, you'd better know what you're doing, because the standard and the expectations are incredibly high.
David Whyte
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To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings.
David Whyte
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We shape our self to fit this world and by the world are shaped again
David Whyte
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I want to know if you are willing to live, day by day, with the consequence of love and the bitter unwanted passion of your sure defeat. I have heard, in that fierce embrace, even the gods speak of God.
David Whyte
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What is precious inside us does not care to be known by the mind in ways that diminish its presence.
David Whyte
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The fear of loss, in one form or another, is the motivator behind all conscious and unconscious dishonesties.
David Whyte
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There is a lovely root to the word humiliation - from the latin word humus, meaning soil or ground. When we are humiliated, we are in effect returning to the ground of our being.
David Whyte
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The marvelous thing about a good question is that it shapes our identity as much by the asking as it does by the answering.
David Whyte
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If I don't have time for the writing, it's because I'm not making that time. It's really just a question of whether you want to or not, whether you feel you deserve to write or not.
David Whyte
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It might be liberating to think of human life as informed by losses and disappearances as much as by gifted appearances, allowing a more present participation and witness to the difficulty of living.
David Whyte
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Heartbreak is how we mature... There is almost no path a human being can follow that does not lead to heartbreak.
David Whyte
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Anything that does not bring you alive is too small for you.
David Whyte
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The frail, vulnerable sounds of which we are capable seem to be essential to a later ability to roar like a lion without scaring everyone to death.
David Whyte