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
Passion
Every
Heating
Way
Layer
Psyche
Layers
Carried
Burn
Finally

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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.
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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 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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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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I don't mean to be flippant about cancer - it was hard, it was tough and it was scary. Then my next manuscript was about cancer because I had a whole new topic to write about. And because I wrote, it didn't take over. Writing took the chaos out of cancer.
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Poetry is a dumb Buddha who thinks a donkey is as important as a diamond.
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In writing practice, there's no direction. You enter your own mind and follow it where it takes you. We have a great need to connect with our own mind and our own true self. And all of us have a story to tell.
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Writing can teach us the dignity of speaking the truth.
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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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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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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 am free to write the worst junk in the world.
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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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poems are small moments of enlightenment
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As writers we need to crack open language.
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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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When you are not writing, you are a writer too. It doesn't leave you.
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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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We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded.
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To encounter a fine book and have time to read it is a wonderful thing.
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