Top 200 Natalie Goldberg Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “We must remember that everything is ordinary and extraordinary. It is our minds that either open or close.”

— Natalie Goldberg

52. “The muscles of writing are not so visible, but they are just as powerful: determination, attention, curiosity, a passionate heart.”

— Natalie Goldberg

53. “Know that you will eventually have to leave everything behind; the writing will demand it of you.”

— Natalie Goldberg

54. “In the middle of the world, make one positive step. In the center of chaos, make one definitive act. Just write.”

— Natalie Goldberg

55. “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

56. “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

57. “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

58. “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

59. “The things that make you a functional citizen in society – manners, discretion, cordiality – don’t necessarily make you a good writer. Writing needs raw truth, wants your suffering and darkness on the table, revels in a cutting mind that takes no prisoners...”

— Natalie Goldberg

60. “You’ll lose your reader if you are vague, not clear, and not present. We love details, personal connections, stories.”

— Natalie Goldberg

61. “Kill the idea of the lone, suffering artist. Don’t make it any harder on yourself.”

— Natalie Goldberg

62. “One poem or story doesn’t matter one way or the other. It’s the process of writing and life that matters.”

— Natalie Goldberg

63. “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

64. “Learning to write is not a linear process. There is no logical A-to-B-to-C way to become a good writer. One neat truth about writing cannot answer it all. There are many truths. To do writing practice means to deal ultimately with your whole life.”

— Natalie Goldberg

65. “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

66. “The aim is to burn through to first thoughts, to the place where energy is unobstructed by social politeness or the internal censor, to the place where you are writing what you mind actually sees and feels, not what it thinks it should see or feel.”

— Natalie Goldberg

67. “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.”

— Natalie Goldberg

68. “There is no security, no assurance that because we wrote something good two months ago, we will do it again. Actually, every time we begin, we wonder how we ever did it before.”

— Natalie Goldberg

69. “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

70. “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

71. “When you write what you know, you stay in control. One of the first things I encourage my writing students to do is to lose control – say what they want to say, break structure.”

— Natalie Goldberg

72. “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.”

— Natalie Goldberg

73. “We never graduate from first grade. 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; we don’t drink a glass once and never have to drink one again. We don’t finish one poem or novel and never have to write one again. Over and over, we begin. This is good. This is kindness. We don’t forget our roots.”

— Natalie Goldberg

74. “I remember a friend many years ago who had taped a sign to his refrigerator: There’s a dream dreaming us. If you try to think about what that means it makes your mind silly, but that silliness is good.”

— Natalie Goldberg

75. “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

76. “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

77. “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

78. “Writing can teach us the dignity of speaking the truth...”

— Natalie Goldberg

79. “It is simply that person’s time. Ours will come in this lifetime or the next. No matter. Continue to practice.”

— Natalie Goldberg

80. “Miyamoto Musashi’s actual burial ground was in close range. According to legend he had been buried in full samurai regalia clutching his faithful sword. The last line of the translation: He died lonely. The Japanese liked loneliness. It had a different quality than our dreaded isolation. More like one with the void, alone with the Alone, no longer separate from anything. It was the final compliment to describe him this way.”

— Natalie Goldberg

81. “The problem is we think we exist.”

— Natalie Goldberg

82. “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

83. “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

84. “It is very important to go home if you want your work to be whole. You don’t have to move in with your parents again and collect a weekly allowance, but you must claim where you come from and look deep into it. Come to honor and embrace it, or at the least, accept it.”

— Natalie Goldberg

85. “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

86. “Read books. They are good for us.”

— Natalie Goldberg

87. “We never graduate from first grade. Over and over, we have to go back to the beginning.”

— Natalie Goldberg

88. “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

89. “A responsibility of literature is to make people awake, present, alive. If the writer wanders, then the reader, too, will wander.”

— Natalie Goldberg

90. “Being an artist in our society makes us lonely. Everyone else leaves in the morning for work and structured jobs. Artists live outside that built in social system.”

— Natalie Goldberg

91. “As writers we need to crack open language.”

— Natalie Goldberg

92. “Oh, my passion! That is what finally carried me through. Let passion burn all the way, heating up every layer of the psyche.”

— Natalie Goldberg

93. “Wait until you are hungry to say something, until there is an aching in you to speak.”

— Natalie Goldberg

94. “To read and to write is to be empowered. No shackle can ultimately hold you.”

— Natalie Goldberg

95. “Our job as writers is to listen, to come home to the four corners of the earth.”

— Natalie Goldberg

96. “Never underestimate people. They do desire the cut of truth.”

— Natalie Goldberg

97. “Great lovers realize that they are what they are in love with.”

— Natalie Goldberg

98. “You must be a great warrior when you contact first thoughts and write from them.”

— Natalie Goldberg

99. “Creativity is no big deal.”

— Natalie Goldberg

100. “Ninety percent of writing is about listening.”

— Natalie Goldberg