Gail Godwin Quotes

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

Other people don't exist when you're not with them.

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

If someone had really done you an ill turn and later came to you and said, "I am truly sorry," would that mean as much to you as "the burden of it has been intolerable to me"? Remorse

the remembrance of them is grievous unto us; the burden of them is intolerable.

I contemplated how I was going to get through the rest of the day and felt the onset of a terror I thought I had outgrown.

I hated it when these clusters started to form. One unwelcome subject sought out its counterparts - farewells, people leaving and never coming back, ambulances.... And then those counterparts attracted similar old hurts and horrors until you were trapped in the nucleus of the cluster. This cluster, I knew, was labeled LOSS in big black letters. I knew this much, thanks to therapy and training, but simply knowing it didn't protect you from reacting to it over and over again. Until one day you resolved to sit down in the middle of the nucleus, fold your arms, and invite the cluster to do its worst. And if you survived that, you could look around and see what was left in its absence.

Not everybody gets to grow up. First you have to survive your childhood, and then begins the hard work of growing into it.

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

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

Hope does not necessarily have to take an object ...

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

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

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.

I believe that dreams transport us through the underside of our days, and that if we wish to become acquainted with the dark side of what we are, the signposts are there, waiting for us to translate them.

Remorse went out of fashion around the same time that "Stop feeling guilty," and "You're too hard on yourself," and "You need to love yourself more" came into fashion.

Negative people present us with an accelereted personal growth opportunity.

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.

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

Life is a disease ...

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

One of the notebooks was for musings and pep talks. ... The other notebooks were for writing out the novel the way authors had done for centuries.

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

As a teacher, Kurt Vonnegut was easy, magnanimous. He didn't try to make his students into little Kurt Vonneguts. He respected material unlike his own and was startlingly humble about what he did. ("I write with a big black crayon," he would write to me later, "while you're more of an impressionist. I don't think you have it in you to be crude.") In his workshop sessions, things always seemed a little looser, a little kinder, a little funnier.

I'm not sure I know what 'simple-hearted' means," I said haughtily. "When there's no deceit or malice in your heart. Most of us have some; it protects us. People without it are rare.