“ So you see, imagination needs moodling - long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering. ”
- Brenda Ueland- Copy
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“ Think of yourself as an incandescent power, illuminated and perhaps forever talked to by God and his messengers. ”
- Brenda Ueland- Copy
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“ So you see, imagination needs moodling - long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering. ”
- Brenda Ueland- Copy
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“ Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express. ”
- Brenda Ueland- Copy
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“ Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express. ”
- Brenda Ueland- Copy
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“ It is so conceited and timid to be ashamed of one’s mistakes. Of course they are mistakes. Go on to the next. ”
- Brenda Ueland- Copy
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“ I learned...that inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic, energetic striving, but it comes into us slowly and quietly and all the time, though we must regularly and every day give it a little chance to start flowing, prime it with a little solitude and idleness. ”
- Brenda Ueland- Copy
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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. ”
- Brenda Ueland- Copy
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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. ”
- Brenda Ueland- Copy
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“ ...the best way to know the Truth or Beauty is to try to express it. And what is the purpose of existence Here or Yonder but to discover truth and beauty and express it, i.e., share it with others? ”
- Brenda Ueland- Copy
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“ (about William Blake) As for Blake's happinessa man who knew him said: "If asked whether I ever knew among the intellectual, a happy man, Blake would be the only one who would immediately occur to me." And yet this creative power in Blake did not come from ambition. ...He burned most of his own work. Because he said, "I should be sorry if I had any earthly fame, for whatever natural glory a man has is so much detracted from his spiritual glory. I wish to do nothing for profit. I wish to live for art. I want nothing whatever. I am quite happy." ...He did not mind death in the least. He said that to him it was just like going into another room. On the day of his death he composed songs to his Maker and sang them for his wife to hear. Just before he died his countenance became fair, his eyes brightened and he burst into singing of the things he saw in heaven. ”
- Brenda Ueland- Copy
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“ (about William Blake) [Blake] said most of us mix up God and Satan. He said that what most people think is God is merely prudence, and the restrainer and inhibitor of energy, which results in fear and passivity and "imaginative death." And what we so often call "reason" and think is so fine, is not intelligence or understanding at all, but just this: it is arguing from our *memory* and the sensations of our body and from the warnings of other people, that if we do such and such a thing we will be uncomfortable. "It won't pay." "People will think it is silly." "No one else does it." "It is immoral." But the only way you can grow in understanding and discover whether a thing is good or bad, Blake says, is to do it. "Sooner strangle an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires." For this "Reason" as Blake calls it (which is really just caution) continually nips and punctures and shrivels the imagination and the ardor and the freedom and the passionate enthusiasm welling up in us. It is Satan, Blake said. It is the only enemy of God. "For nothing is pleasing to God except the invention of beautiful and exalted things." And when a prominent citizen of his time, a logical, opining, erudite, measured, rationalistic, Knowitall, warned people against "mere enthusiasm," Blake wrote furiously (he was a tenderhearted, violent and fierce redhaired man): "Mere enthusiasm is the All in All! ”
- Brenda Ueland- Copy
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“ I learned...that inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic, energetic striving, but it comes into us slowly and quietly and all the time, though we must regularly and every day give it a little chance to start flowing, prime it with a little solitude and idleness. ”
- Brenda Ueland- Copy
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“ In fact that is why the lives of most women are so vaguely unsatisfactory. They are always doing secondary and menial things (that do not require all their gifts and ability) for others and never anything for themselves. Society and husbands praise them for it (when they get too miserable or have nervous breakdowns) though always a little perplexedly and halfheartedly and just to be consoling. The poor wives are reminded that that is just why wives are so splendid because they are so unselfish and selfsacrificing and that is the wonderful thing about them! But inwardly women know that something is wrong. They sense that if you are always doing something for others, like a servant or nurse, and never anything for yourself, you cannot do others any good. You make them physically more comfortable. But you cannot affect them spiritually in any way at all. For to teach, encourage, cheer up, console, amuse, stimulate or advise a husband or children or friends, you have to be something yourself. [...]"If you would shut your door against the children for an hour a day and say; 'Mother is working on her fiveact tragedy in blank verse!' you would be surprised how they would respect you. They would probably all become playwrights. ”
- Brenda Ueland- Copy
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“ In the same way there is much, much in all of us, but we do not know it. No one ever calls it out in us, unless we are lucky enough to know intelligent, imaginative, sympathetic people who love us and have the magnanimity to encourage us, to believe in us, by listening, by praise, by appreciation, by laughing. If you are going to write, you must become aware of this richness in you and come to believe in it and know it is there so that you can write opulently with with selftrust. Once you become aware of it, have faith in it, you will be all right. But it is like this: if you have a million dollars in the bank and don't know, it doesn't so you any good. ”
- Brenda Ueland- Copy
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“ Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express. ”
- Brenda Ueland- Copy
“ The only good teachers for you are those friends who love you, who think you are interesting, or very important, or wonderfully funny; whose attitude is: "Tell me more. Tell me all you can. 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- Copy
“ The imagination needs moodling,long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering. ”
- Brenda Ueland- Copy
“ In fact that is why the lives of most women are so vaguely unsatisfactory. They are always doing secondary and menial things (that do not require all their gifts and ability) for others and never anything for themselves. Society and husbands praise them for it (when they get too miserable or have nervous breakdowns) though always a little perplexedly and halfheartedly and just to be consoling. The poor wives are reminded that that is just why wives are so splendid because they are so unselfish and selfsacrificing and that is the wonderful thing about them! But inwardly women know that something is wrong. They sense that if you are always doing something for others, like a servant or nurse, and never anything for yourself, you cannot do others any good. You make them physically more comfortable. But you cannot affect them spiritually in any way at all. For to teach, encourage, cheer up, console, amuse, stimulate or advise a husband or children or friends, you have to be something yourself. [...]"If you would shut your door against the children for an hour a day and say; 'Mother is working on her fiveact tragedy in blank verse!' you would be surprised how they would respect you. They would probably all become playwrights. ”
- Brenda Ueland- Copy
“ 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. ”
- Brenda Ueland- Copy
“ Don't always be appraising yourself, wondering if you are better or worse than other writers. "I will not Reason and Compare," said Blake; "my business is to Create." Besides, since you are like no other being ever created since the beginning of Time, you are incomparable. ”
- Brenda Ueland- Copy
“ 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 knowitalls, jeerers, critics, doubters. ”
- Brenda Ueland- Copy
“ Families are great murderers of the creative impulsive, particularly husbands. ”
- Brenda Ueland- Copy
“ ...at last I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had. ”
- Brenda Ueland- Copy
“ Remember William Blake who said: "Improvement makes straight, straight roads, but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius." The truth is, life itself, is always startling, strange, unexpected. But when the truth is told about it everybody knows at once that it is life itself and not made up. But in ordinary fiction, movies, etc, everything is smoothed out to seem plausiblevillains made bad, heroes splendid, heroines glamorous, and so on, so that no one believes a word ”
- Brenda Ueland- Copy
“ Yes, I hate orthodox criticism. I don't mean great criticism, like that of Matthew Arnold and others, but the usual small niggling, fussymussy criticism, which thinks it can improve people by telling them where they are wrong, and results only in putting them in straitjackets of hesitancy and selfconsciousness, and weazening all vision and bravery. ...I hate it because of all the potentially shining, gentle, gifted people of all ages, that it snuffs out every year. It 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 very first ones to get killed off. It is the brutal egotists that survive. ”
- Brenda Ueland- Copy
“ Think of yourself as an incandescent power, illuminated and perhaps forever talked to by God and his messengers. ”
- Brenda Ueland- Copy
“ ...the best way to know the Truth or Beauty is to try to express it. And what is the purpose of existence Here or Yonder but to discover truth and beauty and express it, i.e., share it with others? ”
- Brenda Ueland- Copy
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