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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.

Natalie Goldberg

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Natalie Goldberg
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: January 4
Author
Novelist
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Ordinary
Mythical
Alive
Pump
Lives
Pumps
Earth
Magnificent
Heart
Instant
Winter
Hearts
Sorrow
Winters

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Wherein we discover that many of the rules for good writing and good sex are the same: Keep your hand moving, lose control, and don't think.
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Wait until you are hungry to say something, until there is an aching in you to speak.
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[T]he one thing I want for you is to recognize when you are really singing in writing practice and honor that. Trust that. When you were screaming on the page. Maybe that doesn't make a whole book but that is the true seed.
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I used to think freedom meant doing whatever you want. It means knowing who you are, what you are supposed to be doing on this earth, and then simply doing it.
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Oh, my passion! That is what finally carried me through. Let passion burn all the way, heating up every layer of the psyche.
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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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Writing is not a McDonald's Hamburger.
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Poetry is a dumb Buddha who thinks a donkey is as important as a diamond.
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You don't know what you're doing. You're just hoping that people won't make fun of you. I had no idea how it would turn out.
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Really you don't need more information. If you've lived twenty years, you probably have enough material for the rest of your life
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Even an ice cream parlor - a definite advantage - does not alleviate the sorrow I feel for a town lacking a bookstore.
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I had cancer for fourteen months and wrote a memoir about the experience.
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Finally, one just has to shut up, sit down, and write.
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I honor English majors. It's a dumb thing to major in. It leads nowhere. It's good to be dumb, it allows us to love something for no reason. That's the best kind of love.
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I wonder if I don't give too much of myself to writing: I am always half where I am the other half is feeding the furnace, kick-starting the heat of creativity. I am making love with someone but at the same time I'm noticing how this graceful hand across my belly might just fit in with the memory of lilacs in Albuquerque in 1974.
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I told all kinds of stories about going to Japan, about playing ball with my father... I wanted to record my life in case it was going to end soon. So, I wrote that and it was very comforting to have that practice in the afternoons in my living room. I just wrote about my life.
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First thoughts have tremendous energy. The internal censor usually squelches them, so we live in the realm of second and third thoughts, thoughts on thought, twice and three times removed from the direct connection of the first fresh flash.
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I think book publishing is fun, but I also know I've been very lucky.
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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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Creativity is no big deal.
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