… when I am really alone some power seems to grow in me. … Conjugality made me think of a three-legged race, where two people cannot go fast and keep tripping each other because their two legs are tied together.
BRENDA UELANDYour motto: Be Bold, Be Free, Be Truthful.
More Brenda Ueland Quotes
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I want to understand more about everything you feel and know and all the changes inside and out of you. Let more come out.” And if you have no such friend,–and you want to write,–well, then you must imagine one.
BRENDA UELAND -
Work freely and rollickingly as though you were talking to a friend who loves you. Mentally (at least three or four times a day) thumb your nose at all know-it-alls, jeerers, critics, doubters.
BRENDA UELAND -
Write a true, careless, slovenly impulsive, honest diary every day of your life.
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Families are great murderers of the creative impulsive, particularly husbands.
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Be bold, free, and truthful.
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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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Now some people when they sit down to write and nothing special comes, no good ideas, are so frightened that they drink a lot of strong coffee to hurry them up, or smoke packages of cigarettes, or take drugs or get drunk.
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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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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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Everybody is original, if he tells the truth, if he speaks from himself. But it must be from his *true* self and not from the self he thinks he *should* be.
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To have the external pressure of a job removed is very astonishing. Your own will is now your only motor and it has no horse-power.
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Know that it is good to work. Work with love and think of liking it when you do it.
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You can argue with a theologian or a politician, but doctors are sacrosanct. They know; you do not. Science has its mystique much more powerful than any religion active today.
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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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If you would shut your door against the children for an hour a day and say: ‘Mother is working on her five-act tragedy in blank verse!’ you would be surprised how they would respect you. They would probably all become playwrights.
BRENDA UELAND