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Be tough in the way a blade of grass is: rooted, willing to lean, and at peace with what is around it.

Natalie Goldberg

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Natalie Goldberg
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: January 4
Author
Novelist
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Way
Blades
Lean
Rooted
Grass
Tough
Willing
Peace
Around
Blade

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When you are not writing, you are a writer too. It doesn't leave you.
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It’s much better to be a tribal writer, writing for all people and reflecting many voices through us, than to be a cloistered being trying to find one peanut of truth in our own individual mind. Become big and write with the whole world in your arms.
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The first thing is how awful cancer was, the experience. When you first go through it, you're just trying to survive. But when I wrote about it, I really digested it. It was unbearable but I had practice behind me.
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Choose your tools carefully, but not so carefully that you get uptight or spend more time at the stationery store than at your writing table.
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If I didn't have that, fear and projections over what was coming next could have taken over. But it was tough. Don't think I was an angel. It was hell.
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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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Poems are taught as though the poet has put a secret key in his words and it is the reader's job to find it. Poems are not mystery novels.
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This is the practice school of writing. Like running, the more you do it, the better you get at it.
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Life is not orderly. No matter how we try to make it so, right in the middle of it we die, lose a leg, fall in love, or drop a jar of applesauce.
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Kill the idea of the lone, suffering artist. Don't make it any harder on yourself.
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I still write with pen and paper and have someone type it on a computer. But rewriting I do by hand.
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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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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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The correctness and quality of what you write do not matter the act of writing does.
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To encounter a fine book and have time to read it is a wonderful thing.
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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 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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You live and then you die, I thought. It's good to have some good times.
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Sometimes when you think you are done, it is just the edge of beginning. Probably that's why we decide we're done. It's getting too scary. We are touching down onto something real. It is beyond the point when you think you are done that often something strong comes out.
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Shut up and write anyway. Don't use anything as an excuse.
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