we like fixed rules because that ends thinking and we can rest. But there is no resting place down here.
BRENDA UELANDYour motto: Be Bold, Be Free, Be Truthful.
More Brenda Ueland Quotes
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Try to discover your true, honest, untheoretical self.
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There is that American pastime known as “kidding” – with the result that everyone is ashamed and hangdog about showing the slightest enthusiasm or passion or sincere feeling about anything.
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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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So remember these two things: you are talented and you are original. Be sure of that. I say this because self-trust is one of the very most important things in writing.
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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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Science and vivisection make no appeal to a theological idea, much less a political one.
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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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Sometimes I think that perhaps the most competent business men, and lawyers and doctors, who must be at the office at nine o’clock every morning, do not realize this and take more credit for initiative and industry than they deserve.
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You Do Not Know Is in You- an Inexhaustible Fountain of Ideas. Another reason for writing a diary is to discover that the ideas in you are an inexhaustible fountain.
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And least of all – which is so important, too – to those we do not love. But we should. Because listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force…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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the only way to become a better writer is to become a better person.
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But in ordinary fiction, movies, etc, everything is smoothed out to seem plausible–villains made bad, heroes splendid, heroines glamorous, and so on, so that no one believes a word
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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.
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But the great artists like Michelangelo and Blake and Tolstoi–like Christ whom Blake called an artist because he had one of the most creative imaginations that ever was on earth–do not want security, egoistic or materialistic. Why, it never occurs to them.
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… 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 UELAND