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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.

Natalie Goldberg

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Natalie Goldberg
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: January 4
Author
Novelist
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Trying
Wrote
Really
Behinds
Behind
Practice
Digested
Experience
Unbearable
Firsts
Survive
First
Awful
Thing
Cancer

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Because I've been doing my practice for so long, I knew what to do even under really hard circumstances.
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Learning to write is not a linear process. There is no logical A-to-B-to-C way to become a good writer. One neat truth about writing cannot answer it all. There are many truths. To do writing practice means to deal ultimately with your whole life.
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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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Clarity and perseverance are difficult in American society because the basis of capitalism is greed and dissatisfaction.
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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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Shut up and write. Don't talk about writing, just physically do it.
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The difference between neurosis and wisdom is struggle.
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Writing can teach us the dignity of speaking the truth.
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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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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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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 think book publishing is fun, but I also know I've been very lucky.
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After you have finished a piece of work, the work is then none of your business. Go on and do something else.
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We walk through so many myths of each other and ourselves we are so thankful when someone sees us for who we are and accepts us.
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The problem is we think we exist.
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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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To encounter a fine book and have time to read it is a wonderful thing.
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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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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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Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.
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