Gail Godwin Quotes

21 Sourced Quotes

I believe that dreams transport us through the underside of our days, and that if we wish to become acquainted with the dark side of what we are, the signposts are there, waiting for us to translate them. Dreams say what they mean, but they don't say it in daytime language.

Gail Godwin
The act of longing for something will always be more intense than the requiting of it.

Gail Godwin
None of us suddenly becomes something overnight. The preparations have been in the making for a lifetime.

Gail Godwin
Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater.

Gail Godwin
One is taught by experience to put a premium on those few people who can appreciate you for what you are.

Gail Godwin
If writing is your vocation, it keeps making more of you. But when you get to be an older writer, you enter a room where you want to use yourself up. You want to use up all your material, you want to amplify it, so that when you go there's nothing left.

Gail Godwin
Actors between plays are like ghosts looking for bodies to inhabit.

Gail Godwin
Learning when 'enough is enough' is the discipline of a lifetime.

Gail Godwin
Her profession was words and she believed in them deeply. The articulation, interpretation, appreciation, and preservation of good words. She believed in their power. If you truly named something, you had that degree of control over it. Words could incite, soothe, destroy, exorcise, redeem.

Gail Godwin
At times... one is downright thankful for the self-absorption of other people.

Gail Godwin
I work continuously within the shadow of failure. For every novel that makes it to my publisher's desk, there are at least five or six that died on the way. And even with the ones I do finish, I think of all the ways they might have been better.

Gail Godwin
I read constantly. If I don't have a good book, I'm beside myself.

Gail Godwin
I want to be a good person, to have a strong will but not be inflexible; to court joy; to develop humor and loyalty and patience; to learn to say less when no words improve the situation.

Gail Godwin
Every one of us is a soul, and we're tethered to our ego, and some egos are larger than others.

Gail Godwin
I believe that with enough practice and good faith, you can learn to recognize when the work is achieved.

Gail Godwin
The more you respect and focus on the singular and the strange, the more you become aware of the universal and infinite.

Gail Godwin
Some things arrive on their own mysterious hour, on their own terms and not yours, to be seized or relinquished forever.

Gail Godwin
If there is such a thing as sin in this world, I think it must be shutting oneself up against hope.

Gail Godwin
Much of the activity we think of as writing is, actually, getting ready to write.

Gail Godwin
Heroics are not easily had for the young in our times. Perhaps that is why they go to such extremes to create their own dangers.

Gail Godwin
What did a few ripples in the flesh matter when, all too soon, now or later, that flesh would be making its return journey to dust?

Gail Godwin