Top 40 Gail Godwin Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths pure theatre.”

— Gail Godwin

2. “Learning when ‘enough is enough’ is the discipline of a lifetime.”

— Gail Godwin

3. “The act of longing for something will always be more intense than the requiting of it.”

— Gail Godwin

4. “The best antidote I have found is to yearn for something. As long as you yearn, you can’t congeal: There is a forward motion to yearning.”

— Gail Godwin

5. “Something’s your vocation if it keeps making more of you.”

— Gail Godwin

6. “There are things we can’t undo, but perhaps there is a kind of constructive remorse that could transform regrettable acts into something of service to life.”

— Gail Godwin

7. “Some things arrive in their own mysterious hour, on their own terms and not yours, to be seized or relinquished forever.”

— Gail Godwin

8. “Dreams say what they mean, but they don’t say it in daytime language.”

— Gail Godwin

9. “One is taught by experience to put a premium on those few people who can appreciate you for what you are.”

— Gail Godwin

10. “You’re supposed to get tired planting bulbs. But it’s an agreeable tiredness.”

— Gail Godwin

11. “None of us suddenly becomes something overnight. The preparations have been in the making for lifetime.”

— Gail Godwin

12. “Negative people present us with an accelereted personal growth opportunity.”

— Gail Godwin

13. “Who wanted to creep along in comfort when there was one chance in a thousand of flying?”

— Gail Godwin

14. “I work continuously within the shadow of failure. For every novel that makes it to my publisher’s desk, there are at least five or six that died on the way. And even with the ones I do finish, I think of all the ways they might have been better.”

— Gail Godwin

15. “I believe that dreams transport us through the underside of our days, and that if we wish to become acquainted with the dark side of what we are, the signposts are there, waiting for us to translate them.”

— Gail Godwin

16. “The race of children possesses magically sagacious powers.”

— Gail Godwin

17. “During the act of writing I have told myself something that I didn’t know I knew.”

— Gail Godwin

18. “How easy it was to make people happy, when you didn’t want or need anything from them.”

— Gail Godwin

19. “I read constantly. If I don’t have a good book, I’m beside myself.”

— Gail Godwin

20. “Actors between plays are like ghosts looking for bodies to inhabit.”

— Gail Godwin

21. “Much of the activity we think of as writing is, actually, getting ready to write.”

— Gail Godwin

22. “The person in the song is really addressing a powerful and constant state of yearning more than he is any real lover. It’s the state of this yearning that torments him, yet he also loves his torment. He needs it. Because he understands that being able to feel this yearning so exquisitely is his secret strength.”

— Gail Godwin

23. “The future arches above us all like a giant question mark, looming or embracing by whims and turns.”

— Gail Godwin

24. “But the son whips out a Bayer aspirin, the father rises to his feet, embraces the son, and Technicolor is restored to their lives.”

— Gail Godwin

25. “Then he laughed, his typical laugh. Making me wish i had ten more such anectodes stashed away to keep him standing there, holding onto me and laughing.”

— Gail Godwin

26. “It was more like I saw him coming and knew he was the one. I went out of myself to meet him and then couldn’t get back inside without bringing him with me.”

— Gail Godwin

27. “The characters that I create are parts of myself and I send them on little missions to find out what I don’t know yet.”

— Gail Godwin

28. “I’m always aware that I risk being taken for a neurasthenic prima donna when I explain to someone who wants ‘just a little’ of my time that five minutes of the wrong kind of distraction can ruin a working day.”

— Gail Godwin

29. “The more you respect and focus on the singular and the strange, the more you become aware of the universal and infinite.”

— Gail Godwin

30. “If there is such a thing as sin in this world, I think it must be shutting oneself up against hope.”

— Gail Godwin

31. “A person always has control over how she meets her adversities, and the good news is that the facing of them, one after another, year after year, builds an inner strength that nobody can take away from you.”

— Gail Godwin

32. “Hope does not necessarily have to take an object...”

— Gail Godwin

33. “Not everybody gets to grow up. First you have to survive your childhood, and then begins the hard work of growing into it.”

— Gail Godwin

34. “Heroics are not easily had for the young in our times. Perhaps that is why they go to such extremes to create their own dangers.”

— Gail Godwin

35. “I believe that with enough practice and good faith, you can learn to recognize when the work is achieved.”

— Gail Godwin

36. “What did a few ripples in the flesh matter when, all too soon, now or later, that flesh would be making its return journey to dust?”

— Gail Godwin

37. “When I was in seminary,” Father Edward had told other guests around the table when he was purchasing his books, “my spiritual director told me not to read theology. ‘Read novels,’ he said, and I have.”

— Gail Godwin

38. “After all the human noise and conflicts have stopped, the absent person has more room in your heart to spread out and be herself. My mother’s been gone ten years and I know her much better now than when we saw each other every day.”

— Gail Godwin

39. “As long as you can go on creating new roles for yourself, you are not vanquished.”

— Gail Godwin

40. “But what we ought to fear is the kind of death that happens in life. It can happen at any time. You’re going along, and then, at some point, you congeal. You know, like jelly. You’re not fluid anymore. You solidify at a certain point and from then on your life is doomed to be a repetition of what you have done before.”

— Gail Godwin

41. “The human mind, as we know from personal experience, is a chronic time traveler, but we are repeatedly amazed by its ability to hitch up the body, the body that resides the only place it can – in present time – and pull it along like a wagon, with its entire load of sensory equipment, backward or forward into other time zones.”

— Gail Godwin

42. “How glibly and thoughtlessly that phrase ‘make us grow’ slides off our tongues. As if growth were always a happy, shapely matter: leaves unfurling, blossoms opening, hearts and minds joyously stretching toward more light. Whereas the fact of the matter was, when we asked for growth, we were asking for a mess. Exploding tempers, privately nursed little petri dishes of resentments, insecure stumblings into dangerous new places.”

— Gail Godwin

43. “May their having each other make more of them both.”

— Gail Godwin

44. “The walk north was exactly the right distance to make me walk out of myself... If you walked out of yourself going north, what did you do on the return walk? Enjoyed my emptiness. Or sometimes just congratulated myself for escaping.”

— Gail Godwin