Natalie Goldberg Quotes

86 Sourced Quotes

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.

Natalie Goldberg
Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency.

Natalie Goldberg
If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you.

Natalie Goldberg
Trust in what you love, continue to do it, and it will take you where you need to go.

Natalie Goldberg
Can we walk that thin line between constant change and continuation? And in the middle of this flux, feel gratitude but not hold on? Gratitude greases the joints to let us let go, and at the same time to stop and realize we received something. Gratitude is the most developed and mature of human emotions.

Natalie Goldberg
Writers are great lovers. They fall in love with other writers. That's how they learn to write. They take on a writer, read everything by him or her, read it over again until they understand how the writer moves, pauses, and sees. That's what being a lover is: stepping out of yourself, stepping into someone else's skin.

Natalie Goldberg
There is freedom in being a writer and writing. It is fulfilling your function. I used to think freedom meant doing whatever you want. It means knowing who you are, what you are supposed to be doing on this earth, and then simply doing it.

Natalie Goldberg
Have you murdered anyone in the last day, week, month, year, decade? Probably not. Then don't worry about it. Give yourself a break. You're probably a really fine person.

Natalie Goldberg
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...

Natalie Goldberg
We may love men and we may live with men, but some of them have said stupendously inaccurate things about us, our bodies, and our psyches.

Natalie Goldberg
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.

Natalie Goldberg
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.

Natalie Goldberg
A responsibility of literature is to make people awake, present, alive. If the writer wanders, then the reader, too, will wander.

Natalie Goldberg
I feel very rich when I have time to write and very poor when I get a regular paycheck and no time at my real work.

Natalie Goldberg
Use original detail in your writing. Life is so rich, if you can write down the real details of the way things were and are, you hardly need anything else.

Natalie Goldberg
And we can't avoid an inch of our own experience; if we do it causes a blur, a bleep, a puffy unreality. Our job is to wake up to everything, because if we slow down enough, we see that we are everything.

Natalie Goldberg
This is your life. You are responsible for it. You will not live forever. Don't wait.

Natalie Goldberg
Use loneliness. Its ache creates urgency to reconnect with the world. Take that aching and use it to propel you deeper into your need for expression - to speak, to say who you are.

Natalie Goldberg
Wait until you are hungry to say something, until there is an aching in you to speak.

Natalie Goldberg
Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.

Natalie Goldberg