Gail Godwin Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

Negative people present us with an accelereted personal growth opportunity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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.

Hope does not necessarily have to take an object.

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'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.

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?