Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. 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 UELANDAnd so try listening. Listen to your wife, your husband, your father, your mother, your children, your friends; to those who love you and those who don’t, to those who bore you, to your enemies. It will work a small miracle. And perhaps a great one.
More Brenda Ueland Quotes
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Think of yourself as incandescent power, illuminated perhaps and forever talked to by God and his messengers.
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When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand. Ideas actually begin to grow within us and come to life.
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Creative listeners are those who want you to be recklessly yourself, even at your very worst, even vituperative, bad-tempered. They are laughing and just delighted with any manifestation of yourself, bad or good.
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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.
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I found that many gifted people are so afraid of writing a poor story that they cannot summon the nerve to write a single sentence for months.
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You know, I have come to think listening is love, that’s what it really is.
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Creative power flourishes only when I am living in the present.
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Advertising companies hire the very brightest, wittiest young people to write for them. Not one single sentence of it is worth repeating. Why? Because it wasn’t meant.
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The only good teachers for you are those friends who love you, who think you are interesting, or very important, or wonderfully funny.
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Writing is the action of thinking, just as drawing is the action of seeing and composing music is the action of hearing.
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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.
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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.
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we like fixed rules because that ends thinking and we can rest. But there is no resting place down here.
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Try to discover your true, honest, untheoretical self.
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Of course, in fairness, I must remind you of this: that we writers are the most lily-livered of all craftsmen. We expect more, for the most peewee efforts, than any other people.
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