Quote

Women need space and silence. We too quickly give away our energy. There's something about holding that richness.

Natalie Goldberg

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Natalie Goldberg
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: January 4
Author
Novelist
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Needs
Silence
Something
Space
Energy
Away
Give
Women
Richness
Need
Holding
Giving
Quickly

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In the West, a teacher imparts knowledge to a student. In the East, a teacher transmits nothing more or less than his or her Being.
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To encounter a fine book and have time to read it is a wonderful thing.
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It is very important to go home if you want your work to be whole. You don't have to move in with your parents again and collect a weekly allowance, but you must claim where you come from and look deep into it. Come to honor and embrace it, or at the least, accept it.
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We have to accept ourselves in order to write. Now none of us does that fully: few of us do it even halfway. Don’t wait for one hundred percent acceptance of yourself before you write, or even eight percent acceptance. Just write. The process of writing is an activity that teaches us about acceptance.
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I don't think everyone wants to create the great American novel, but we all have a dream of telling our stories-of realizing what we think, feel, and see before we die. Writing is a path to meet ourselves and become intimate.
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Shut up and write anyway. Don't use anything as an excuse.
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You live and then you die, I thought. It's good to have some good times.
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Every moment is enormous and it is all we have.
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The things that make you a functional citizen in society - manners, discretion, cordiality - don't necessarily make you a good writer. Writing needs raw truth, wants your suffering and darkness on the table, revels in a cutting mind that takes no prisoners.
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Indefinite plans get dubious results.
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Writers end up writing about their obsessions. Things that haunt them things they can’t forget stories they carry in their bodies waiting to be released.
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So writing is not just writing. It is also having a relationship with other writers. And don't be jealous, especially secretly. That's the worst kind. If someone writes something great, it's just more clarity in the world for all of us.
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Clarity and perseverance are difficult in American society because the basis of capitalism is greed and dissatisfaction.
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I think talent is like a water table under the earth—you tap it with your effort and it comes through you.
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Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.
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I consider writing practice a true Zen practice because it all comes back at you. You can't fool anyone because it's on the page.
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Because I've been doing my practice for so long, I knew what to do even under really hard circumstances.
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It is odd that we never question the feasibility of a football team practicing long hours for one game yet in writing we rarely give ourselves the space for practice.
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Our lives are at once ordinary and mythical. At the same instant we have these magnificent hearts that pump through all sorrow and all winters we are alive on the earth.
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Literature gives us the great gift of the present moment.
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