A Quote by Brenda Ueland
...at last I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had.
Related Quotes
I find that I'm not as worried anymore about what other people think. That's a comfortable place to be. And I'm starting to let go of the feeling that I need to push myself to do things I don't want to do - an impulse that has always been linked to the feeling that I'm not enough.
The truth is people are very nice. The other truth is, it's very annoying to be constantly interrupted. I don't love myself enough to want to share myself with everybody.
What keeps me motivated to create new music is the joy of songwriting. The joy of being creative. The joy of writing a poem or essay. Writing anything. I just love writing, whether it is music or words. I just didn't need to share it for the last 18 years. When you share it, it brings on other things, which is good.
Gratitude is the inward feeling of kindness received. Thankfulness is the natural impulse to express that feeling. Thanksgiving is the following of that impulse.
If you had only truth, goodness, and harmony on your side, and the complete absence of the other, there would be no creative impulse.
We are all very anxious to be understood, and it is very hard not to be. But there is one thing much more necessary.' What is that, grandmother?' To understand other people.' Yes, grandmother. I must be fair - for if I'm not fair to other people, I'm not worth being understood myself. I see.
I had to do things to myself on the page that had been done to me in real life. I had to try and drown myself in the bath. You have to do that. And the impulse is to rescue yourself and to spare the reader, but I can't rescue myself. And why should I spare the reader when nobody spared me? It's telling people what happened.
When I was writing the memoir, every page was a battle with myself because I knew I had to tell the truth. That's what the memoir form demands. I also had to figure out how much of the truth do I tell, how do I make the truth as balanced as I possibly can? How do I make these people as complicated and as human and as unique and as multifaceted as I possibly can? For me, that was the way I attempted to counteract some of that criticism.
Poetry is a way of being alone without feeling alone. It allows you to experience another mind, I suppose. And it does that more fully than other art forms, I think. It doesn't simply describe an experience, or a feeling, or a moment: it evokes it through, say, rhythm or tone or diction or metaphor. It creates a mood. A poem communicates before it is understood; it's not a fully paraphrasable form, which distinguishes it from other forms of writing.
She encouraged any artistic impulse I had, and my father discouraged any artistic impulse I had. They took out their problems with each other on me and my sister.
Finally, the truth. Lying with his face pressed into the dusty carpet of the office where he had once thought he was learning the secrets of victory, Harry understood at last that he was not supposed to survive.
...you could not measure love on a scale of degrees, and now she understood that it was the same with pain. Pain might escalate upward and, just when you thought you'd reach your limit, begin to spread sideways, and spill out, and touch other people, and mix with their pain. And grow larger, but somehow less oppressive. She had thought herself trapped in a place outside the ordinary feeling lives of people; she had not noticed how many other people were trapped in that place with her.
The impulse to write comes, I think, from a desire - perhaps a need - to give imaginative life to experience, to share it with the reader, not to cover up the truth but to deliver it obliquely.
Being in love is a good thing, but it is not the best thing. There are many things below it, but there are also things above it. You cannot make it the basis of a whole life. It is a noble feeling, but it is still a feeling. Now no feeling can be relied on to last in its full intensity, or even to last at all. Knowledge can last, principles can last, habits can last; but feelings come and go.
The whole purpose of writing a book is to be understood - if other people write about you, they try to guess why you did things, or they hear things from other people.
I feel like my mission is to be honest with myself. My mission is to share my truth - share, not give. I think that's what an artist is supposed to do: I think they share.
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