Quote

Oh, my passion! That is what finally carried me through. Let passion burn all the way, heating up every layer of the psyche.

Natalie Goldberg

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Natalie Goldberg
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: January 4
Author
Novelist
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Every
Heating
Way
Layer
Psyche
Layers
Carried
Burn
Finally
Passion

More quotes by Natalie Goldberg

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Watch yourself. Every minute we change. It is a great opportunity. At any point, we can step out of our frozen selves and our ideas and begin fresh.
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The problem is we think we exist.
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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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I had cancer for fourteen months and wrote a memoir about the experience.
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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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[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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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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The muscles of writing are not so visible, but they are just as powerful: determination, attention, curiosity, a passionate heart.
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Finally, one just has to shut up, sit down, and write.
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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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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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When you write, don't say, I'm going to write a poem. That attitude will freeze you right away. Sit down with the least expectation of yourself say, I am free to write the worst junk in the world.
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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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Actually, every time we begin, we wonder how we did it before, Each time is a new journey with no maps.
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I am free to write the worst junk in the world.
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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 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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I love and care about literature, and great writers are our teachers. You're studying their mind when you read their work.
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I think book publishing is fun, but I also know I've been very lucky.
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In the past few years I've assigned books to be read before a student attends one of my weeklong seminars. I have been astonished by how few people -- people who supposedly want to write -- read books, and if they read them, how little they examine them.
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