Quote

The art form has to do with the mystery and the hidden invitation that's in the room. And that's when the magic happens, that's when the deep silence emerges to the surprise of all the attentively listening ears. In a way, you're following that silence. You go where the silence is deepest.

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
Listening
Deepest
Room
Hidden
Rooms
Surprise
Silence
Following
Art
Ears
Attentively
Happens
Mystery
Emerges
Form
Magic
Invitation
Way
Deep
Invitations

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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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Anything that does not bring you alive is too small for you.
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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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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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Genius is becoming something you were all along.
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I returned to poetry as a more precise way to describe the world, more precise than science.
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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.
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To give generously but appropriately and then, most difficult of all, and as the full apotheosis of the art, with feeling, in the moment and spontaneously, has always been recognized as one of the greatest of human qualities.
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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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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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I want to know if you are willing to live, day by day, with the consequence of 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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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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Everyone casts a shadow. Everyone has a relationship with the fearful unknown.
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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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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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