Natalie Goldberg
Whether you're keeping a journal or writing as a meditation, it's the same thing. What's important is you're having a relationship with your mind.Collection: Relationship
Trust in what you love, continue to do it, and it will take you where you need to go.Collection: Trust
Women need space and silence. We too quickly give away our energy. There's something about holding that richness.Collection: Women
Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency.Collection: Inspirational
Writing can teach us the dignity of speaking the truth.Collection: Writing
I used to think freedom meant doing whatever you want. It means knowing who you are, what you are supposed to be doing on this earth, and then simply doing it.Collection: Mean
If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you.Collection: Voice
This is your life. You are responsible for it. You will not live forever. Don't wait.Collection: Responsibility
We must remember that everything is ordinary and extraordinary. It is our minds that either open or close.Collection: Mind
Whether we know it or not, we transmit the presence of everyone we have ever known, as though by being in each other's presence we exchange our cells, pass on some of our lifeforce, and then we go on carrying that person in our body, not unlike springtime when certain plants in fields we walk through attach their seeds in the form of small burrs to our socks, our pants, our caps, as if to say, 'Go on, take us with you, carry us to root in another place.' This is how we survive long after we are dead. This is why it is important who we become, because we pass it on.Collection: Cells
We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded.Collection: Important
In writing practice, there's no direction. You enter your own mind and follow it where it takes you. We have a great need to connect with our own mind and our own true self. And all of us have a story to tell.Collection: Healing
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.Collection: Notebook
Actually, every time we begin, we wonder how we did it before, Each time is a new journey with no maps.Collection: Inspirational
Be tough in the way a blade of grass is: rooted, willing to lean, and at peace with what is around it.Collection: Way
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.Collection: Strong
Creativity exists in the present moment. You can't find it anywhere else.Collection: Creativity
Writing practice brings us back to the uniqueness of our own minds and an acceptance of it. We all have wild dreams, fantasies, and ordinary thoughts. Let us to feel the texture of them and not be afraid of them.Writing is still the wildest thing I know.Collection: Dream
Life is not orderly. No matter how we try to make life so, right in the middle of it we die, lose a leg, fall in love, drop a jar of applesauce. In summer, we work hard to make a tidy garden, bordered by pansies with rows or clumps of columbine, petunias, bleeding hearts. Then we find ourselves longing for the forest, where everything has the appearance of disorder; yet we feel peaceful there.Collection: Summer
Play around. Dive into absurdity and write. Take chances. You will succeed if you are fearless of failure.Collection: Writing
Our bodies are garbage heaps: we collect experience, and from the decomposition of the thrown-out eggshells, spinach leaves, coffee grinds, and old steak bones out of our minds come nitrogen, heat, and very fertile soil. Out of this fertile soil bloom our poems and stories. But this does not come all at once. It takes time. Continue to turn over and over the organic details of your life until some of them fall through the garbage of discursive thoughts to the solid ground of black soil.Collection: Coffee
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."Collection: Attitude
When you are present, the world is truly alive.Collection: Alive
The muscles of writing are not so visible, but they are just as powerful: determination, attention, curiosity, a passionate heart.Collection: Determination
Writers end up writing about their obsessions. Things that haunt them; things they can’t forget; stories they carry in their bodies waiting to be released.Collection: Writing
poems are small moments of enlightenmentCollection: Enlightenment
Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.Collection: Fear
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.Collection: Jobs
Over and over, we have to go back to the beginning. We should not be ashamed of this. It is good. It's like drinking water.Collection: Drinking
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.Collection: Book
To stay close and intimate with experience is to stay close to the mind; the nitty gritty mind of the way things really are.Collection: Mind
Even an ice cream parlor - a definite advantage - does not alleviate the sorrow I feel for a town lacking a bookstore.Collection: Book
Poetry is a dumb Buddha who thinks a donkey is as important as a diamond.Collection: Thinking
In the middle of the world, make one positive step. In the center of chaos, make one definitive act. Just write.Collection: Writing
First thoughts have tremendous energy. The internal censor usually squelches them, so we live in the realm of second and third thoughts, thoughts on thought, twice and three times removed from the direct connection of the first fresh flash.Collection: Energy
Writing is not a McDonald's Hamburger.Collection: Writing
Be awake to the details around you, but don't be self-conscious.Collection: Self
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.Collection: Change
Once you have learned to trust your own voice and allowed that creative force inside you to come out, you can direct it to write short stories, novels, and poetry, do revisions, and so on. You have the basic tool to fulfill your writing dreams. But beware. This type of writing will uncover other dreams you have, too-going to Tibet, being the first woman president of the United States, building a solar studio in New Mexico-and they will be in black and white. It will be harder to avoid them.Collection: Dream
Original details are very ordinary, except to the mind that sees extraordinariness. it's not that we need to go to the Hopi mesas to see greatness; we need to view what we already have in a different way.Collection: Greatness
In the end, you have to just sit down, shut up, and write.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Book
I had cancer for fourteen months and wrote a memoir about the experience.Collection: Cancer
To encounter a fine book and have time to read it is a wonderful thing.Collection: Book
In a way, the cancer became an ally because it stopped me from running around so much. I was able to settle down and write things I hadn't had a chance to before.Collection: Running
I don't mean to be flippant about cancer - it was hard, it was tough and it was scary. Then my next manuscript was about cancer because I had a whole new topic to write about. And because I wrote, it didn't take over. Writing took the chaos out of cancer.Collection: Cancer
It is simply that person's time. Ours will come in this lifetime or the next. No matter. Continue to practice.Collection: Practice
Our job as writers is to listen, to come home to the four corners of the earth.Collection: Jobs
Let's say I've directed that [writing] energy into writing my latest book but suddenly, I really want to write about an onion. I don't say to myself, "No, you have stay on the subject," because I know that the longer I stay on the subject the more boring I get. So, if my mind wants to write about an onion, it might be a deeper way to go into what I'm working on, even though it might seem irrelevant. This is how I've learned to follow my mind.Collection: Book
The correctness and quality of what you write do not matter; the act of writing does.Collection: Writing