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.
BRENDA UELANDBe bold, free, and truthful.
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…. Think if Tiffany’s made a mosquito, how wonderful we would think it was!
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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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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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Know that it is good to work. Work with love and think of liking it when you do it.
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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.
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You know, I have come to think listening is love, that’s what it really is.
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They do not know that ideas come slowly, and that the more clear, tranquil and unstimulated you are, the slower the ideas come, but the better they are.
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Science and vivisection make no appeal to a theological idea, much less a political one.
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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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I know that we live after death and again and again, not in the memory of our children, or as a mulch for trees and flowers, however poetic that may be, but looking passionately and egocentrically out of our eyes.
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Write a true, careless, slovenly impulsive, honest diary every day of your life.
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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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And this fear (since the imagination is always creative) comes about presently and you slide down into the complete slump of several weeks or years – the very thing you dreaded and set your jaw against.
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Orthodox criticism … is a murderer of talent. And because the most modest and sensitive people are the most talented, having the most imagination and sympathy, these are the first ones to get killed off.
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I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like child stringing beads in kindergarten, – happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.
BRENDA UELAND