A Quote by Richard Nelson

The mountain has left me feeling renewed, more content and positive than I’ve been for weeks, as if something has been given back after a long absence, as if my eyes have opened once again. For this time at least, I’ve let myself be rooted in the unshakable sanity of the senses, spared my mind the burden of too much thinking, turned myself outward to experience the world and inward to savor the pleasures it has given me.
It has been said that life has treated me harshly; and sometimes I have complained in my heart because many pleasures of human experience have been withheld from me...if much has been denied me, much, very much, has been given me.
It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naive. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man!
Days I enjoy are days when nothing happens, When I have no engagements written on my block, When no one comes to disturb my inward peace, When no one comes to take me away from myself And turn me into a patchwork, a jig-saw puzzle, A broken mirror that once gave a whole reflection, Being so contrived that it takes too long a time To get myself back to myself when they have gone.
Come hell or high water you will never take me back to the place I was before. I have been through too much to let life whoop me again. My faith is stronger than it's ever been, my mind is more tenacious than it's ever been, my soul is more absolute.
To be allowed to come back to WWE is the greatest gift that's ever been given to me. Back in the day, I never appreciated what WWE had given me, because I was in too much disarray and too confused about my own life. I let opportunities foolishly slip through my hands.
Knowing that a story needs to be told is a great motivator, even if telling a given story comes at a price. Writing Hunger has been the most difficult writing of my life, and it's the rawest and perhaps most necessary. We'll see how people take it. I always strive to write beyond personal catharsis because though I write first and foremost for myself, I do recognize that I need to look outward as much if not more than I look inward, so the reader has something with which they can engage.
God has blessed me. I've been given a lot. I'm at peace with myself. It's time to give back.
Obviously I tell myself I'm more than happy for everything that's been given to me. But if I wake up one morning and my kidney decides 'I don't fancy it today', I'm back to square one.
I know that one of the things that I really did to push myself was to write more formal poems, so I could feel like I was more of a master of language than I had been before. That was challenging and gratifying in so many ways. Then with these new poems, I've gone back to free verse, because it would be easy to paint myself into a corner with form. I saw myself becoming more opaque with the formal poems than I wanted to be. It took me a long time to work back into free verse again. That was a challenge in itself. You're always having to push yourself.
If your reader has been given a rousing opening, he will usually then sit still for at least some exposition. But be sure to follow that chunk of telling with one or more dramatized scenes. That's much more effective than being given section after section of telling.
Frank W. Woolworth once told me that the turning-point in his career did not come until he was thrown flat on his back by illness. He was sure that his business would go to pieces during his long, enforced absence. Instead, he discovered that he had in his employ men who could overcome difficulties when given power to exercise initiative. After that Woolworth left many problems and difficulties to be solved by subordinates and turned his attention to big things.
I immediately cotton on to the fact that intelligence thus lightly used, and one-upmanshipishly displayed, is a birthmark giving me a two-coloured face, is a goitre, a hump on the back, webbed toes, and makes me stink like the night-man. Once again I learn what I knew on my very first day at Kensington School, and have carelessly forgotten, that it is more intelligent to appear less intelligent. I henceforth rein myself in, and publicly give back only what I have been given - fifty-six for seven- eights.
Sometimes it's not like I write very specific, it's more like I add an atmosphere almost to something that might have been quite awkward in my mind from the beginning. Something has happened and I want to force myself to think of it in a more positive way. And then I force myself to write something that convinces me that this is actually something pretty good or something that I learned something valuable from.
I think my lesson is to back yourself once you've been given a job. Far too often, I've been given a job and then doubted why I'm there.
Seeing him again after so long awakened something inside me. I was surprised to find myself feeling sad rather than joyful, as I would have imagined.
I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.
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