Top 100 Natalie Goldberg Quotes
#1. We are each a concert reverberating with our whole lives and reflecting and amplifying the world around us.
Natalie Goldberg
#2. In the middle of the world, make one positive step. In the center of chaos, make one definitive act. Just write.
Natalie Goldberg
#3. If we see their (Navajo) lives and festivals as fantastic and our lives as ordinary, we come to writing with a sense of poverty. We must remember that everything is ordinary and extraordinary.
Natalie Goldberg
#4. Go ahead; take Kant's PROLEGOMENA TO ANY FUTURE METAPHYSIC and get it to show what he is telling. We would all be a lot happier.
Natalie Goldberg
#5. Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.
Natalie Goldberg
#6. And don't worry too much about security. You will eventually have a deep security when you begin to do what you want.
Natalie Goldberg
#7. Write about "leaving." Approach it any way you want. Write about your divorce, leaving the house this morning, or a friend dying.
Natalie Goldberg
#8. Take out another notebook, pick up another pen, and just write, just write, just write. In the middle of the world, make one positive step. In the center of chaos, make one definitive act. Just write. Say yes, stay alive, be awake. Just write. Just write. Just write.
Natalie Goldberg
#9. Wherein we discover that many of the "rules" for good writing and good sex are the same: Keep your hand moving, lose control, and don't think.
Natalie Goldberg
#10. Too often we take notes on writing, we think about writing but never do it. I want you to walk into the heart of the storm, written words dripping off hair, eyelids, hanging from hands.
Natalie Goldberg
#11. Clarity and perseverance are difficult in American society because the basis of capitalism is greed and dissatisfaction.
Natalie Goldberg
#12. Finally, if you want to write, you have to just shut up, pick up a pen, and do it. I'm sorry there are no true excuses. This is our life. Step forward. Maybe it's only for ten minutes. That's okay. To write feels better than all the excuses.
Natalie Goldberg
#13. Watch yourself. Every minute we change. It is a great opportunity. At any point, we can step out of our frozen selves and our ideas and begin fresh.
Natalie Goldberg
#14. Poems are taught as though the poet has put a secret key in his words and it is the reader's job to find it. Poems are not mystery novels.
Natalie Goldberg
#16. It is also hard to write about a city we just moved to; it's not yet in our body.
Natalie Goldberg
#17. OK, now write for ten minutes, keep the hand moving, tell me what you carry.
Natalie Goldberg
#18. I often wonder if all the writers who are alcoholics drink a lot because they aren't writing. It is not because they are writers that they are drinking, but because they are writers who are not writing.
Natalie Goldberg
#20. And we can't avoid an inch of our own experience; if we do it causes a blur, a bleep, a puffy unreality. Our job is to wake up to everything, because if we slow down enough, we see that we are everything.
Natalie Goldberg
#23. Even an ice cream parlor - a definite advantage - does not alleviate the sorrow I feel for a town lacking a bookstore.
Natalie Goldberg
#24. Play around. Dive into absurdity and write. Take chances. You will succeed if you are fearless of failure.
Natalie Goldberg
#25. When you write, don't say, "I'm going to write a poem." That attitude will freeze you right away. Sit down with the least expectation of yourself; say, "I am free to write the worst junk in the world."
Natalie Goldberg
#26. Katagiri Roshi says: "Poor artists. They suffer very much. They finish a masterpiece and they are not satisfied. They want to go on and do another." Yes, but it's better to go on and do another if you have the urge than to start drinking and become alcoholic or eat a pound of good fudge and get fat.
Natalie Goldberg
#27. To stay close and intimate with experience is to stay close to the mind; the nitty gritty mind of the way things really are.
Natalie Goldberg
#28. Life is not orderly. No matter how we try to make it so, right in the middle of it we die, lose a leg, fall in love, or drop a jar of applesauce.
Natalie Goldberg
#30. The positive thing about writing is that you connect with yourself in the deepest way. You get a chance to know who you are, to know what you think. You begin to have a relationship with your mind.
Natalie Goldberg
#31. We walk through so many myths of each other and ourselves; we are so thankful when someone sees us for who we are and accepts us.
Natalie Goldberg
#32. WRITE EVERYTHING YOU know about dying. Just go. Don't think, "What does she mean by that?" Dive in. We die in all kinds of ways. Who died? When did they die? how? why?
Natalie Goldberg
#33. I consider writing practice a true Zen practice because it all comes back at you. You can't fool anyone because it's on the page.
Natalie Goldberg
#34. I feel very rich when I have time to write and very poor when I get a regular paycheck and no time at my real work.
Natalie Goldberg
#36. Once you connect with your mind, you are who you are and you're free.
Natalie Goldberg
#37. Sometimes when you think you are done, it is just the edge of beginning. Probably that's why we decide we're done. It's getting too scary. We are touching down onto something real. It is beyond the point when you think you are done that often something strong comes out.
Natalie Goldberg
#38. We must remember that everything is ordinary and extraordinary. It is our minds that either open or close.
Natalie Goldberg
#39. This quiet place exists as we exist, here on the earth. It just is. That is where the best writing comes from and what we must connect with in order to write well.
Natalie Goldberg
#40. We should notice that we are already supported at every moment. There is the earth below our feet and there is the air, filling our lungs and emptying them. We should begin from this when we need support.
Natalie Goldberg
#41. In the past few years I've assigned books to be read before a student attends one of my weeklong seminars. I have been astonished by how few people
people who supposedly want to write
read books, and if they read them, how little they examine them.
Natalie Goldberg
#42. 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
#43. Ultimately, writing is about trusting your own mind. It is an act of discovery.
Natalie Goldberg
#44. I'm never ashamed to read a book twice or as many times as I want. We never expect to drink a glass of water just once in our lives. A book can be that essential, too.
Natalie Goldberg
#45. And what great writers actually pass on is not so much their words, but they hand on their breath at their moments of inspiration.
Natalie Goldberg
#46. When you write a memory, it isn't in the past anyway. It's alive right now.
Natalie Goldberg
#47. In writing with detail, you are turning to face the world. It is a deeply political act, because you are not staying in the heat of your own emotions. You are offering up some good solid bread for the hungry.
Natalie Goldberg
#48. Happy?" He stared her down. "You can't expect happiness. If it comes along - consider yourself lucky, but that's not what life's about.
Natalie Goldberg
#49. To encounter a fine book and have time to read it is a wonderful thing.
Natalie Goldberg
#50. Kill the idea of the lone, suffering artist. Don't make it any harder on yourself.
Natalie Goldberg
#51. Begin with "I remember." Write lots of small memories. If you fall into one large memory, write that. Just keep going. Don't be concerned if the memory happened five seconds ago or five years ago.
Natalie Goldberg
#52. It's pretty nice to be talented. If you are, enjoy, but it won't take you that far. Work takes you a lot further.
Natalie Goldberg
#53. Writing can teach us the dignity of speaking the truth ...
Natalie Goldberg
#54. When you are not writing, you are a writer too. It doesn't leave you.
Natalie Goldberg
#55. The correctness and quality of what you write do not matter; the act of writing does.
Natalie Goldberg
#57. Writing is 100% listening. You listen so deeply to the space around you that it fills you, and when you write, it pours out of you. if you can capture that reality around you, your writing needs nothing else.
Natalie Goldberg
#59. That dead feeling hits hard and permeates the first year. It comes back to test you often in the following years, but if you get through the first year, then you know about it. It will never have the power to defeat you again.
Natalie Goldberg
#60. Never underestimate people. They do desire the cut of truth.
Natalie Goldberg
#61. Use loneliness. Its ache creates urgency to reconnect with the world. Take that aching and use it to propel you deeper into your need for expression - to speak, to say who you are.
Natalie Goldberg
#62. My teachers could have been Jesse James for all the time they stole from me.
Natalie Goldberg
#63. Great lovers realize that they are what they are in love with.
Natalie Goldberg
#64. Handwriting is more connected to the movement of the heart.
Natalie Goldberg
#65. It's much better to be a tribal writer, writing for all people and reflecting many voices through us, than to be a cloistered being trying to find one peanut of truth in our own individual mind. Become big and write with the whole world in your arms.
Natalie Goldberg
#66. Our lives are at once ordinary and mythical. At the same instant we have these magnificent hearts that pump through all sorrow and all winters we are alive on the earth.
Natalie Goldberg
#67. The only failure in writing is when you stop doing it. Then you fail yourself.
Natalie Goldberg
#68. You'll lose your reader if you are vague, not clear, and not present. We love details, personal connections, stories.
Natalie Goldberg
#69. Of course, we are drawn to teachers who unconsciously mirror our own psychology. None of us are clean. We all make mistakes. It's the repetition of those mistakes and the refusal to look at them that compound the suffering and assure their continuation.
Natalie Goldberg
#71. Choose your tools carefully, but not so carefully that you get uptight or spend more time at the stationery store than at your writing table.
Natalie Goldberg
#72. The deepest secret in our heart of hearts is that we are writing because we love the world.
Natalie Goldberg
#73. Failure is what we're all running from, we're always running toward success with failure at our back.
Natalie Goldberg
#74. Add to the list anytime you think of something. Then when you sit down to write, you can just grab a topic from that list and begin.
Natalie Goldberg
#75. At the moment our rational mind stops, hits against a wall ... something else happens. And a bigger mind, like a pearl, rolls in a silver bowl.
Natalie Goldberg
#76. Know that you will eventually have to leave everything behind; the writing will demand it of you.
Natalie Goldberg
#77. When you bring the darkness to the table, it doesn't rule you or hurt other people, but when we keep it secret, it's dangerous.
Natalie Goldberg
#78. We shouldn't forget that the universe moves with us, is at our back with everything we do.
Natalie Goldberg
#79. The artist and the alcoholic have parallel paths. They both go into the darkness, but the alcoholic gets stuck there. The artist (if she is not also addicted) goes into the darkness and is transformed by the experience and comes out more alive.
Natalie Goldberg
#80. Stress is basically a disconnection from the earth, a forgetting of the breath. Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency. Nothing is that important. Just lie down.
Natalie Goldberg
#81. When we write we begin to taste the texture of our own mind
Natalie Goldberg
#82. A writer's job is to give the reader a larger vision of the world.
Natalie Goldberg
#83. I feel that 'The Great Failure' is really a book written out of great love and a willingness to face all of who a human being is.
Natalie Goldberg
#85. I'm sorry I don't have brilliant reasons for beginning a novel. As you go along, you make up reasons to do what you want. There's an open space. Enter it.
Natalie Goldberg
#86. Hear "You are boring" as distant white laundry flapping in the breeze. Eventually
Natalie Goldberg
#87. It is odd that we never question the feasibility of a football team practicing long hours for one game; yet in writing we rarely give ourselves the space for practice.
Natalie Goldberg
#88. You live and then you die, I thought. It's good to have some good times.
Natalie Goldberg
#89. And though death is howling at our backs and life is roaring at our faces, we can just begin to write, simply begin to write what we have to say.
Natalie Goldberg
#90. Be awake to the details around you, but don't be self-conscious.
Natalie Goldberg
#94. It's the process of writing and life that matters.Too many writers have written great books and gone insane or alcoholic or killed themselves. This process teaches about sanity. We are trying to become sane along with our poems and stories.
Natalie Goldberg
#95. In other words you disappear, you become one with your words, not separate, and when you put your pen down, the you who was writing is gone.
Natalie Goldberg
#96. There's no such thing as a writer's block. If you're having trouble writing, well, pick up the pen and write. No matter what, keep that hand moving. Writing is really a physical activity.
Natalie Goldberg
#97. Be tough in the way a blade of grass is: rooted, willing to lean, and at peace with what is around it.
Natalie Goldberg
#98. Let yourself live in something that is already rightfully yours - your own wild mind.
Natalie Goldberg
#99. Don't let yourself be thrown away ... Continue on no matter what ... Continue to make a positive effort for the good.
Natalie Goldberg
#100. Women need space and silence. We too quickly give away our energy. There's something about holding that richness.
Natalie Goldberg
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