Natalie Goldberg Quotes

86 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

Natalie Goldberg
The only failure in writing is when you stop doing it. Then you fail yourself.

Natalie Goldberg
In a sense, evolution adheres to the classic twelve-step program: it takes things one day at a time. It does not strive for perfection; it does not strive at all. There is no progress, no plans, no scala natura, or scale of nature, that ranks organisms from lowly to superior, primitive to advanced.

Natalie Goldberg
It's much better to be a tribal writer, writing for all people and reflecting many voices through us, than to be a cloistered being trying to find one peanut of truth in our own individual mind. Become big and write with the whole world in your arms.

Natalie Goldberg
Talk when you talk, walk when you walk, and die when you die.

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
Original details are very ordinary, except to the mind that sees extraordinariness. it's not that we need to go to the Hopi mesas to see greatness; we need to view what we already have in a different way.

Natalie Goldberg
If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you. Besides, those voices are merely guardians and demons protecting the real treasure, the first thoughts of the mind.

Natalie Goldberg
Katagiri Roshi says: "Poor artists. They suffer very much. They finish a masterpiece and they are not satisfied. They want to go on and do another." Yes, but it's better to go on and do another if you have the urge than to start drinking and become alcoholic or eat a pound of good fudge and get fat.

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
Our minds hurtled outward in all directions. We became absurdly creative, Homo artifactus, intolerant of bare cave walls and naked clay pots.

Natalie Goldberg
We shouldn't forget that the universe moves with us, is at our back with everything we do.

Natalie Goldberg
Be awake to the details around you, but don't be self-conscious.

Natalie Goldberg
There's an old adage in writing: 'Don't tell, but show.' Writing is not psychology. We do not talk 'about' feelings. Instead the writer feels and through her words awakens those feelings in the reader. The writer takes the reader's hand and guides him through the valley of sorrow and joy without ever having to mention those words.

Natalie Goldberg
We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded.

Natalie Goldberg
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
I honor English majors. It's a dumb thing to major in. It leads nowhere. It's good to be dumb, it allows us to love something for no reason. That's the best kind of love.

Natalie Goldberg
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.

Natalie Goldberg
What writing practice, like Zen practice does is bring you back to the natural state of mind...The mind is raw, full of energy, alive and hungry. It does not think in the way we were brought up to think-well-mann ered, congenial.

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
It is simply that person's time. Ours will come in this lifetime or the next. No matter. Continue to practice.

Natalie Goldberg
When you are not writing, you are a writer too. It doesn't leave you.

Natalie Goldberg
This is why it is good to remember: if you want to get high, don't drink whiskey; read Shakespeare, Tennyson, Keats, Neruda, Hopkins, Millay, Whitman, aloud and let your body sing.

Natalie Goldberg
We must remember that everything is ordinary and extraordinary. It is our minds that either open or close.

Natalie Goldberg
The deepest secret in our heart of hearts is that we are writing because we love the world.

Natalie Goldberg
Writing practice brings us back to the uniqueness of our own minds and an acceptance of it. We all have wild dreams, fantasies, and ordinary thoughts. Let us to feel the texture of them and not be afraid of them.Writing is still the wildest thing I know.

Natalie Goldberg
Know that you will eventually have to leave everything behind; the writing will demand it of you.

Natalie Goldberg