Quote

When you bring the darkness to the table, it doesn't rule you or hurt other people, but when we keep it secret, it's dangerous.

Natalie Goldberg

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Natalie Goldberg
Age: 77
Born: 1948
Born: January 4
Author
Novelist
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Dangerous
Bring
Hurt
Secret
Keep
Table
Doesn
Tables
People
Rule
Darkness

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When you are not writing, you are a writer too. It doesn't leave you.
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Take out another notebook, pick up another pen, and just write, just write, just write. In the middle of the world, make one positive step. In the center of chaos, make one definitive act. Just write. Say yes, stay alive, be awake. Just write. Just write. Just write.
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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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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 am free to write the worst junk in the world.
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Indefinite plans get dubious results.
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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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Every moment is enormous and it is all we have.
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Over and over, we have to go back to the beginning. We should not be ashamed of this. It is good. It's like drinking water.
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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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When I wrote and got out of the way, writing did writing.” (p.90)
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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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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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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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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 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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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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Shut up and write. Don't talk about writing, just physically do it.
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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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Poetry has never been a favorite American pastime.
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