Gail Godwin Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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

Negative people present us with an accelereted personal growth opportunity.

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.

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

Life is a disease.

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

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?

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

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

Hope does not necessarily have to take an object.

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

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

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

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

The race of children possesses magically sagacious powers.

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

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

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?

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.

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

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

Good teaching is l/4th preparation and 3/4ths theatre.

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.