Gail Godwin Quotes

Heroics are not easily had for the young in our times. Perhaps that is why they go to such extremes to create their own dangers.

One is taught by experience to put a premium on those few people who can appreciate you for what you are.

Negative people present us with an accelereted personal growth opportunity.

I'm always aware that I risk being taken for a neurasthenic prima donna when I explain to someone who wants 'just a little' of my time that five minutes of the wrong kind of distraction can ruin a working day.

I work continuously within the shadow of failure. For every novel that makes it to my publisher's desk, there are at least five or six that died on the way. And even with the ones I do finish, I think of all the ways they might have been better.

The more you respect and focus on the singular and the strange, the more you become aware of the universal and infinite.

Something's your vocation if it keeps making more of you.

At times ... one is downright thankful for the self-absorption of other people.

The act of longing for something will always be more intense than the requiting of it.

During the act of writing I have told myself something that I didn't know I knew.

Much of the activity we think of as writing is, actually, getting ready to write.

Some things arrive in their own mysterious hour, on their own terms and not yours, to be seized or relinquished forever.

How easy it was to make people happy, when you didn't want or need anything from them.

I believe that with enough practice and good faith, you can learn to recognize when the work is achieved.

The best antidote I have found is to yearn for something. As long as you yearn, you can't congeal: There is a forward motion to yearning.

The characters that I create are parts of myself and I send them on little missions to find out what I don’t know yet.

None of us suddenly becomes something overnight. The preparations have been in the making for lifetime.

Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths pure theatre.

There are two kinds of people. One kind, you can just tell by looking at them at what point they congealed into their final selves. It might be a very nice self, but you know you can expect no more surprises from it. Whereas, the other kind keep moving, changing... They are fluid. They keep moving forward and making new trysts with life, and the motion of it keeps them young. In my opinion, they are the only people who are still alive. You must be constantly on your guard against congealing.

What did a few ripples in the flesh matter when, all too soon, now or later, that flesh would be making its return journey to dust?

Learning when 'enough is enough' is the discipline of a lifetime.

Who wanted to creep along in comfort when there was one chance in a thousand of flying?

You're supposed to get tired planting bulbs. But it's an agreeable tiredness.

Hope does not necessarily have to take an object.

Life is a disease.

I read constantly. If I don't have a good book, I'm beside myself.

Actors between plays are like ghosts looking for bodies to inhabit.

I confess, right at the start, to the doubts - and sometimes outright dreads - that go with me as I climb the stairs to my study in the morning, coffee mug in hand: I have to admit to the habitual apprehension mixed with a sort of reverence, as I light the incense . . . and wonder: what is going to happen today? Will anything happen? Will the angel come today?

The race of children possesses magically sagacious powers.

If there is such a thing as sin in this world, I think it must be shutting oneself up against hope.

Dreams say what they mean, but they don't say it in daytime language.