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Shedding the carapace we have been building so assiduously on the surface, we must by definition give up exactly what we thought was necessary to protect us from further harm.

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
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Must
Harm
Giving
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Carapace
Necessary
Assiduously
Protect
Shedding
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Insecurity
Thought
Definition

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A real conversation always contains an invitation. You are inviting another person to reveal herself or himself to you, to tell you who they are or what they want.
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When I recite poems onstage, I put myself into the very personal struggle and it grants tremendous perspective. At the same time you get another perspective on the poem you're reciting.
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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.
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The greatest tragedy is to live out someone else's life thinking it was your own.
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and how we are all preparing for that abrupt waking, and that calling, and that moment we have to say yes, except it will not come so grandly, so Biblically, but more subtly and intimately in the face of the one you know you have to love
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Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work, a future. To be courageous, is not necessarily to go anywhere or do anything except to make conscious those things we already feel deeply and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences.
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There is no house like the house of belonging.
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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.
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We sabotage our creative possibilities because the world revealed by our imagination may not fit well with the life we have taken so much trouble to construct over the years. Faced with the pain of that distance, the distance between desire and reality, we turn just for a moment and quickly busy ourselves.
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Absent the edge, we drown in numbness.
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But what would that be like feeling the tide rise out of the numbness inside
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I want to know if you know how to melt into that fierce heat of living falling toward the center of your longing.
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The severest test of work today, is not of our strategies, but of our imaginations and identities.
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Poetry is often the art of overhearing yourself say things you didn't know you knew. It is a learned skill to force yourself to articulate your life, your present world or your possibilities for the future.
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Some things cannot be spoken or discovered until we have been stuck, incapacitated, or blown off course for awhile. Plain sailing is pleasant, but you are not going to explore many unknown realms that way.
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Poetry for me has been a long pilgrimage, a journey and a growing relationship with the unknown.
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What if the world is holding its breath - waiting for you to take the place that only you can fill?
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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.
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What we strive for in perfection is not what turns us into the lit angel we desire what disturbs and then nourishes has everything we need.
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A sure sign of a soul-based workplace is excitement, enthusiasm, real passion not manufactured passion, but real involvement. And there's very little fear.
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