Quote

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.

Natalie Goldberg

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Natalie Goldberg
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: January 4
Author
Novelist
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Stores
Table
Tables
Tools
Spend
Stationery
Choose
Uptight
Writing
Carefully
Time
Store

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Women need space and silence. We too quickly give away our energy. There's something about holding that richness.
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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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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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The problem is we think we exist.
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Clarity and perseverance are difficult in American society because the basis of capitalism is greed and dissatisfaction.
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We must remember that everything is ordinary and extraordinary. It is our minds that either open or close.
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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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The muscles of writing are not so visible, but they are just as powerful: determination, attention, curiosity, a passionate heart.
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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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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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Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency.
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It is simply that person's time. Ours will come in this lifetime or the next. No matter. Continue to practice.
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You'll lose your reader if you are vague, not clear, and not present. We love details, personal connections, stories.
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We never graduate from first grade. Over and over, we have to go back to the beginning.
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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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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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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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When you are present, the world is truly alive.
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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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