A Quote by Brenda Ueland
If you would shut your door against the children for an hour a day and say: 'Mother is working on her five-act tragedy in blank verse!' you would be surprised how they would respect you. They would probably all become playwrights.
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[Grandfather] would manufacture funnies with Grandmother before she died about how he was in love with other women who were not her. She knew it was only funnies because she would laugh in volumes. 'Anna,' he would say, 'I am going to marry that one with the pink hat.' And she would say, 'To whom are you going to marry her?' And he would say, 'To me.' I would laugh very much in the back seat, and she would say to him, 'But you are no priest.' And he would say, 'I am today.' And she would say, 'Today you believe in God?' And he would say, 'Today I believe in love.
I had a personal experience of my mum being in comatose state in 2004. I would go to the hospital every day but would not do anything. I would just meet the doctor for five minutes who would update me about her.
I would rediscover the secret of great communications and great combustions. I would say storm. I would say river. I would say tornado. I would say leaf. I would say tree. I would be drenched by all rains, moistened by all dews. I would roll like frenetic blood on the slow current of the eye of words turned into mad horses into fresh children into clots into curfew into vestiges of temples into precious stones remote enough to discourage miners. Whoever would not understand me would not understand any better the roaring of a tiger.
If I had a daughter, I would tell her certain things. I would tell her that it’s great to be smart, really smart - that being smart makes you strong. I would tell her that emotions are powerful, so don’t be afraid to show them. I would tell her that some people may judge you on how you look or what you wear - that’s just how it is - but you should keep your focus on what you say and do. I would tell her that she may see the world differently from boys, and that difference is essential and good.
Before every show, I would call my mother and say, 'Mummy, I don't know how I will sing today.' But that would change as soon as I went on stage and would merge with my music. She is my best ally, and I don't want to lose her. Nobody other than her would be concerned if I had eaten or had oiled my hair. She is my queen.
As a child, Kate hat once asked her mother how she would know she was in love. Her mother had said she would know she was in love when she would be willing to give up chocolate forever to be with that person for even an hour. Kate, a dedicated and hopeless chocoholic, had decided right then that she would never fall in love. She had been sure that no male was worth such privation.
I know too many playwrights, or would-be playwrights, or would-have-been playwrights, that are around my age, who were bitter or have gone to something else because they got such a raw deal from critics, and some are quite wonderful writers.
I would have a workshop attached to every school, and one hour a day given up to the teaching of simple decorative arts. It would be a golden hour to the children.
People who think they have no belief quite often say they want to pray but they do not know who or what they could be praying to. Aquinas would not say to such people, 'Ah, but you see, if you became a believer, a Christian, we would change all that. You would come to understand to whom you are praying.' Not at all. He would say to such people, 'If you became a Christian you would stop being surprised or ashamed of your condition. You would be happy with it. For faith would assure you that you could not know what God is until he reveals himself to us openly.'
I wish I could do whatever I liked behind the curtain of “madness”. Then: I’d arrange flowers, all day long, I’d paint; pain, love and tenderness, I would laugh as much as I feel like at the stupidity of others, and they would all say: “Poor thing, she’s crazy!” (Above all I would laugh at my own stupidity.) I would build my world which while I lived, would be in agreement with all the worlds. The day, or the hour, or the minute that I lived would be mine and everyone else’s - my madness would not be an escape from “reality”.
The tragedy of love is not death or separation. How long do you think it would have been before one or other of them ceased to care? Oh, it is dreadfully bitter to look at a woman whom you have loved with all your heart and soul, so that you felt you could not bear to let her out of your sight, and realize that you would not mind if you never saw her again. The tragedy of love is indifference.
THE SERUM WEARS off five hours later, when the sun is just beginning to set. Tobias shut me in my room for the rest of the day, checking on me every hour. This time when he comes in, I am sitting on the bed, glaring at the wall. “Thank God,” he says, pressing his forehead to the door. “I was beginning to think it would never wear off and I would have to leave you here to … smell flowers, or whatever you wanted to do while you were on that stuff.
I remember being out here at the Sunset Marquis, and whoever knocked on the door, I would take that picture that I was writing and I would put that in the typewriter, so when I had the meeting, they would say: 'Oh, you're working on it right now?'
Go first to your Highest Thought about yourself. Imagine the you that you would be if you lived that thought every day. Imagine what you would think, do, and say, and how you would respond to what others would do and say. Do you see any difference between that projection and what you think, do, and say now?
Every day when everybody would have lunch I would do TM [Transcendental Meditation] and then I would eat while I was working because I had missed lunch but that is how I survived the 9 years [of Seinfeld], it was that 20 minutes in the middle of the day would save me.
In my day, when you called on a girl, her mother was always hollering down to see if she was still unraped, the maid would look in, her father would shuffle his feet in another room. Today the boy calls up, says, 'Meet you at the back door of Stern's.'
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