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Brenda Ueland Quotes
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Don't think of yourself as an intestinal tract and tangle of nerves in the skull, that will not work unless you drink coffee. Think of yourself as incandescent power, illuminated perhaps and forever talked to by God and his messengers.... Think if Tiffany's made a mosquito, how wonderful we would think it was!
Brenda Ueland
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If we don't act at all (express our imaginings either in work or a changing personality, so that we can learn and think again something better) we certainly rot.
Brenda Ueland
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Now some people when they sit down to write and nothing special comes, no good ideas, are so frightened that they drink a lot of strong coffee to hurry them up, or smoke packages of cigarettes, or take drugs or get drunk. They do not know that ideas come slowly, and that the more clear, tranquil and unstimulated you are, the slower the ideas come, but the better they are.
Brenda Ueland
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The writer has a feeling and utters it from his true self. The reader reads it and is immediately infected and has exactly the same feeling. This is the whole secret of enchantment and fascination.
Brenda Ueland
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Sometimes I think of life as a process where everybody is discouraging and taking everybody else down a peg or two.
Brenda Ueland
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If you write something and they all tell you it is bad - editors, critics, everybody - think it over and you may become convinced that they are right (though you are not to be ashamed or discouraged for a minute, but keep on writing).
Brenda Ueland
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You have to hold your audience in writing to the very end-much more than in talking, when people have to be polite and listen to you.
Brenda Ueland
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The only way to become a better writer is to become a better person.
Brenda Ueland
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The tragedy of bold, forthright, industrious people is that they act so continuously without much thinking, that it becomes dry and empty.
Brenda Ueland
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I know that we live after death and again and again, not in the memory of our children, or as a mulch for trees and flowers, however poetic that may be, but looking passionately and egocentrically out of our eyes.
Brenda Ueland
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The best way to know the Truth or Beauty is to try to express it.
Brenda Ueland
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The spirit, I think, is a stream, a fountain, and must be continually poured out, for only if it is poured out will more and clearer streams come.
Brenda Ueland
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Everybody is original, if he tells the truth, if he speaks from himself. But it must be from his *true* self and not from the self he thinks he *should* be.
Brenda Ueland
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At last I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had.
Brenda Ueland
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If I did not wear torn pants, orthopedic shoes, frantic disheveled hair, that is to say, if I did not tone down my beauty, people would go mad. Married men would run amuck.
Brenda Ueland
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We are always afraid to start something that we want to make very good, true, and serious.
Brenda Ueland
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We like fixed rules because that ends thinking and we can rest. But there is no resting place down here.
Brenda Ueland
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The death of any loved parent is an incalculable lasting blow. Because no one ever loves you again like that.
Brenda Ueland
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When we really listen to people there is an alternating current, and this recharges us so that we never get tired of each other. We are constantly being re-created.
Brenda Ueland
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If you are never satisfied with what you write, that is a good sign. It means that your vision can see so far that it's hard to come up to it. Again I say - the only unfortunate people are the glib ones, immediately satisfied with their work. To them, the ocean is only knee-deep.
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So remember these two things: you are talented and you are original. Be sure of that. I say this because self-trust is one of the very most important things in writing.
Brenda Ueland
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Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express.
Brenda Ueland
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So you see, imagination needs coddling — long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.
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There is that American pastime known as "kidding" - with the result that everyone is ashamed and hangdog about showing the slightest enthusiasm or passion or sincere feeling about anything.
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In true courage there is always an element of choice, of an ethical choice, and of anguish, and also of action and deed. Here is always a flame of spirit in it, a vision of some necessity higher than oneself.
Brenda Ueland
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Quote of the day
Destiny is the invention of the cowardly, and the resigned.
Ignazio Silone
Brenda Ueland
Born:
October 24, 1891
Died:
March 5, 1985
(aged 93)
Bio:
Brenda Ueland was a journalist, editor, freelance writer, and teacher of writing. She is best known for her book If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit.
Known for:
If you want to write (1938)
Strength to your sword arm
O Clouds, Unfold
Si quieres escribir
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