A Quote by Paula Gunn Allen

As long as we avoid the creative, we are condemned to reaction.

Paula Gunn Allen

Quote Topics

Avoid Condemned Creative Long Reaction

Quote Author

Paula Gunn Allen
American - Novelist
October 24, 1939 - May 29, 2008

As I see it, creative achievement is the very heart of the human enterprise... The destiny of man, of all men and of each man, is that he is condemned to invent what he will be - condemned if he is fearful but blessed if he welcomes the great adventure. We are responsible in the last analysis, not simply for what we are, but for what we will become; and that is a source of either high excitement or distress.

Paul Kurtz

For basically three years, I was doing 'Catfish' and 'We Are Your Friends' at the same time - it was like straddling two very long-term creative marriages. And when you're in a long-term creative commitment, you tend to daydream and fantasize about smaller creative flings that you want to have.

Max Joseph

Depend on it, that from every condition of distress or evil there is a great reaction, and the greater the evil or distress, the greater the reaction. If we do not get a reaction quick, we will get it long when it does come.

Theodore Dreiser

The reaction to any word may be, in an individual, either a mob-reaction or an individual reaction. It is up to the individual to ask himself: Is my reaction individual, or am I merely reacting from my mob-self? When it comes to the so-called obscene words, I should say that hardly one person in a million escapes mob-reaction.

D. H. Lawrence

But this is not difficult, O Athenians! to escape death; but it is much more difficult to avoid depravity, for it runs swifter than death. And now I, being slow and aged, am overtaken by the slower of the two; but my accusers, being strong and active, have been overtaken by the swifter, wickedness. And now I depart, condemned by you to death; but they condemned by truth, as guilty of iniquity and injustice: and I abide my sentence, and so do they. These things, perhaps, ought so to be, and I think that they are for the best.

Plato

reaction isn't action - that is, it isn't truly creative.

Elizabeth Janeway

We like reactions - a reaction is walking out on us, a reaction is throwing tomatoes at the stage, that's a healthy psychological reaction.

Alice Cooper

THE BAD THING ABOUT FEAR Is it requires a reaction. Some hide. Some cry. But, like a dog condemned to a walled yard with no hope of escape or affection, some learn to bite.

Ellen Hopkins

Poor Englishwomen! When it comes to their clothes- well, the French reaction is a shrug, the Italian reaction a spreading of the hands and a lifting of the eyes and the American reaction simply one of amused contempt.

James Laver

I was 3 years old and Mary Poppins [1964] made an impression on me that was seismic, apparently. I fell into some kind of total creative, imaginative rapture over that movie that propelled this industry of Mary Poppins drawings, plays, performances - just an obsessive, creative reaction to it.

Todd Haynes

I just love any kind of language that can change the energy in a room. There are no limits for me, as long as it feels like it's being used in a particular way to garner or elicit a very particular reaction so that you can then use that reaction later for something else.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge

When a person is dispossessed of his land, there is a reaction and you have to deal with the reaction properly. You just can't deal with the reaction by giving him money.

Kushal Pal Singh

When we do not understand something, a common reaction is to fear it. In government, this is the usual, and encouraged, reaction. The reaction to the gig economy has been no different, and this growing fear has unfortunately turned into a legislative bloodbath.

John McAfee

The usual terminology of political language is stupid. What is 'left' and what is 'right'? Why should Hitler be 'right' and Stalin, his temporary friend, be 'left'? Who is 'reactionary' and who is 'progressive'? Reaction against an unwise policy is not to be condemned. And progress towards chaos is not to be commended.