Up: [[Life Writing]] Created: 2025-01-17 Updated: 2026-02-10 > [!Orbit] [[Marion Woodman]] in *Addiction to Perfection* > Unconsciousness needs the eye of consciousness; consciousness needs the energy of the unconscious. Writing allows that interchange to take place. > [!Orbit] Sarah Cooper in *Foolish: Tales of Assimilation, Determination and Humiliation* > I love that my writing evolves as I do. I love that my writing helps me evolve. > [!Orbit] Salman Rushdie > Never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things — childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves — that go on slipping, like sand, through our fingers. > [!Orbit] Isabel Allende > Write what should not be forgotten. > [!Orbit] Joy Harjo > As I write I create myself again and again. > [!Orbit] [[Michel de Montaigne]] > Our life is part folly, part wisdom. Whoever writes about it only reverently and according to the rules leaves out more than half of it. > [!Orbit] Barbara Kingsolver > Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer. > > [!orbit] Rebecca Solnit in *Recollections of My Nonexistence: a memoir* > Writing is often treated as a project of making things, one piece at a time, but you write from who you are and what you care about and what true voice is yours and from leaving all the false voices and wrong notes behind, and so underneath the task of writing a particular piece is the general one of making a self who can make the work you are meant to make. (p. 122) > [!Orbit] Georges Perec in *Species of Spaces and Other Pieces* >I know roughly speaking, how I became a writer. I don’t know precisely why. In order to exist, did I really need to line up words and sentences? In order to exist, was it enough for me to be the author of a few books?…One day I shall certainly have to start using words to uncover what is real, to uncover my reality. > [!Orbit] Marion Milner in *A Life of One’s Own* > Sometimes it seemed that the act of writing was fuel on glowing embers, making flames leap up and throw light on the surrounding gloom, giving me fitful gleams of what was before unguessed at. (p. 47) > [!Orbit] Rebecca Solnit in *Recollections of My Nonexistence: a memoir* > Becoming a writer formalizes the task that faces us all in making a life; to become conscious of what the overarching stories are and whether or not they serve you, and how to compose versions with room for who you are and what you value. (p. 130) > [!Orbit] Elias Canetti > The self-explorer, whether he wants to or not, becomes the explorer of everything else. > [!Orbit] Anne Morrow Lindbergh in *Gift from the Sea* > I want a singleness of eye, a purity of intention, a central core to my life. > [!Orbit] Henry David Thoreau > I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. > > [!Orbit] [[C. G. Jung]] > For a young person, it is almost a sin, or at least a danger, to be too preoccupied with himself; but for the ageing person, it is a duty and a necessity to devote serious attention to himself. > [!Orbit] J.M. Barrie > The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it. > [!Orbit] Judith Gomez > Creativity emerges from the inner yearning to find and express meaning in life. > [!Orbit] Elissa Altman in *Permission* > Every family has a core legend, a koan — a defining, foundational, sometimes cryptic narrative around which its generations are coiled. (p. xvii) > [!Orbit] Melissa Febos in *Body Work* > There is no pain in my life that has not been given value by the alchemy of creative attention. > [!Orbit] E.B. White > Remember that writing is translation, and the opus to be translated is yourself. > [!Orbit] Virginia Woolf in *A Room of One’s Own* > So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. > [!Orbit] Louise Bourgeois > Tell your own story, and you will be interesting. > [!Orbit] [[C. G. Jung]] in *Memories, Dreams, Reflections* > I asked myself, ‘What is the myth you are living?’ and found that I did not know. So… I took it upon myself to get to know ‘my’ myth and regarded this as the task of tasks… I simply had to know what unconscious or preconscious myth was forming me. > [!Orbit] [[Rumi]] in the poem ‘Unfold Your Own Myth’ > Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth… > [!orbit] Hilary Mantel > When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you might have led. All your houses are haunted by the person you might have been. > [!Orbit] May Sarton in *Plant Dreaming Deep* > We are all myth-makers about ourselves, but part of growing up is the shedding of one myth for another, as a snake sheds its skin. > [!Orbit] Natalie Goldberg in *Writing Down the Bones* > …our lives are at once ordinary and mythical. (p. 47) > [!Orbit] Clarissa Pinkola Estes in *Women Who Run with the Wolves* > The doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door. If you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door. > [!Orbit] James Baldwin in *The Price of the Ticket* > Go back to where you started, or as far as you can, examine all of it, travel the road again and tell the truth about it. Sing or shout or testify or keep it to yourself, but *know whence you came*. (introduction)