Natalie Goldberg - Wild mind (1990)

20 Sourced Quotes

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

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
You'll lose your reader if you are vague, not clear, and not present. We love details, personal connections, stories.

Natalie Goldberg
We are each a concert reverberating with our whole lives and reflecting and amplifying the world around us.

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
Oh, my passion! That is what finally carried me through. Let passion burn all the way, heating up every layer of the psyche.

Natalie Goldberg
Have compassion for yourself when you write. There is no failure - just a big field to wander in.

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

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
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
After you have finished a piece of work, the work is then none of your business. Go on and do something else.

Natalie Goldberg
I remember a friend many years ago who had taped a sign to his refrigerator: There's a dream dreaming us. If you try to think about what that means it makes your mind silly, but that silliness is good.

Natalie Goldberg
Clarity and perseverance are difficult in American society because the basis of capitalism is greed and dissatisfaction.

Natalie Goldberg
Life is not orderly. No matter how we try to make life so, right in the middle of it we die, lose a leg, fall in love, drop a jar of applesauce. In summer, we work hard to make a tidy garden, bordered by pansies with rows or clumps of columbine, petunias, bleeding hearts. Then we find ourselves longing for the forest, where everything has the appearance of disorder; yet we feel peaceful there.

Natalie Goldberg
Writing is the crack through which you can crawl into a bigger world, into your wild mind.

Natalie Goldberg
We never graduate from first grade. Over and over, we have to go back to the beginning.

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

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
We have to accept ourselves in order to write. Now none of us does that fully: few of us do it even halfway. Don't wait for one hundred percent acceptance of yourself before you write, or even eight percent acceptance. Just write. The process of writing is an activity that teaches us about acceptance.

Natalie Goldberg
Poetry is a dumb Buddha who thinks a donkey is as important as a diamond.

Natalie Goldberg