Natalie Goldberg Quotes

Life is weird, great and dangerous.

Life is like a cobweb, not an organization chart.

I bring to my life a certain amount of mess.

Life isn't like a book. Life isn't logical or sensible or orderly. Life is a mess most of the time. And theology must be lived in the midst of that mess.

We live in a rainbow of chaos.

Nature can always be more complicated than we imagine.

The world does not have tidy endings. The world does not have neat connections. It is not filled with epiphanies that work perfectly at the moment that you need them.

Shuffling is the only thing which Nature cannot undo.

In an upside down world, with all the rules being rewritten as the game goes on and spectators invading the pitch, it is good to feel that some things and some people seem to stay just as they were.

Trying to make order out of my life was like trying to pick up a jellyfish.

Life is nutty; anything can happen.

History goes out of control almost as often as nature does.

There is no way to order chaos. It's the fundamental theory at the beginning and end of everything; it's the ultimate law of nature. There's no way to win against unpredictability, to suit up completely against accidents.

I don't ever want to tie a song in a little bow. Life doesn't work that way, and war doesn't ever work that way.

Chaos is the undercurrent of everything that happens in life.

We're dealing with the chaos of life, and we're rubbing it down. The deeper you rub, the more patterns you can see until you realize that it's really an organized chaos. There isn't really ever any chance to understand it all, but we're here to keep rubbing.

The green thumb is equable in the face of nature's uncertainties; he moves among her mysteries without feeling the need for control or explanations or once-and-for-all solutions. To garden well is to be happy amid the babble of the objective world, untroubled by its refusal to be reduced by our ideas of it, its indomitable rankness.

In biology, nothing is clear, everything is too complicated, everything is a mess, and just when you think you understand something, you peel off a layer and find deeper complications beneath. Nature is anything but simple.

Death is simple. Life is messy. Give me life, the more complicated the better.

Life does not seem to present itself to me for my convenience, to box itself up nicely so I can write about it with wisdom and a point to make before putting it on a shelf somewhere.

But if everything was always smooth and perfect, you'd get too used to that, you know? You have to have a little bit of disorganization now and then. Otherwise, you'll never really enjoy it when things go right.

Reality had no gears, and you never knew what surprises would come spinning out of its chaos.

Life is nothing without a little chaos to make it interesting.

Life itself, she thought, as she went upstairs to dress for dinner, was stranger than dreams and far, far more disordered.

Living is merely the chaos of existence.