If you're always looking at someone else, trying to imitate them, how can your natural gifts ever emerge?

It took time to learn that the hard thing about writing is to let the story write itself, while one sits at the typewriter and does as little thinking as possible. It happened over and over again, and the beginner learned - when you start puzzling over an idea, and slowing down on the keys, the writing gets worse and worse.

We're all the sons of God, or children of the Is, or ideas of the Mind, or however else you want to say it.

Within each of us lies the power of our consent to health and sickness, to riches and poverty, to freedom and to slavery. It is we who control these, and not another.

I'm utterly convinced of the One-ness of Love and us as its perfect reflection. I am absolutely convinced that the world around us is a world of appearances and anyone who wants to can practice it. Change your thought and your environment will change. It's not instantaneous and sometimes we have to work very hard to make what we want happen. Working hard and holding that thought, it will change.

If we change in different directions, then we don't have any future anyway, do we? I think it's possible for two people to change together, to grow together and enrich instead of diminish each other. The sum of one and one, if they're the right ones, can be infinity! But so often one person drags the other down; one person wants to go up like a balloon and the other's a dead weight. I've always wondered what it would be like if both people, if a woman and a man both wanted to go up like balloons!

One of the great cosmic laws, I think, is that whatever we hold in our thought will come true in our experience. When we hold something, anything, in our thought, then somehow coincidence leads us in the direction that we've been wishing to lead ourselves.