Quote

The harder you chase something, the faster you go and the less you're able to let life meet life. If you're having difficulty coming up with new ideas, then slow down.

Natalie Goldberg

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Natalie Goldberg
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: January 4
Author
Novelist
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Ideas
Slow
Something
Faster
Life
Difficulty
Harder
Meet
Coming
Less
Able
Chase

More quotes by Natalie Goldberg

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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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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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As writers we need to crack open language.
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The correctness and quality of what you write do not matter the act of writing does.
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If you're having difficulty coming up with new ideas, then slow down. For me, slowing down has been a tremendous source of creativity. It has allowed me to open up -- to know that there's life under the earth and that I have to let it come through me in a new way. Creativity exists in the present moment. You can't find it anywhere else.
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Wherein we discover that many of the rules for good writing and good sex are the same: Keep your hand moving, lose control, and don't think.
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Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency.
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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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The problem is we think we exist.
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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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When you are not writing, you are a writer too. It doesn't leave you.
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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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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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Anything we fully do is an alone journey.
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I came out with a book called The True Secret of Writing: Connecting Life with Language. It's a book that describes how writing is a practice and how my teaching is part of that practice. I direct the writing and create books but underneath, there's always the river of practice happening. No good, no bad. Just do it.
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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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Really you don't need more information. If you've lived twenty years, you probably have enough material for the rest of your life
Natalie Goldberg
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Shut up and write anyway. Don't use anything as an excuse.
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We have to accept ourselves in order to write. Now none of us does that fully: few of us do it even halfway. Don’t wait for one hundred percent acceptance of yourself before you write, or even eight percent acceptance. Just write. The process of writing is an activity that teaches us about acceptance.
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Literature gives us the great gift of the present moment.
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