Natalie Goldberg Quotes

Everything for me becomes allegory.

One's capacity for metaphor is one's capacity for a full life.

Metaphor creates a kind of conceptual synesthesia, in which we understand one concept in the context of another.

When you have spent an important part of your life playing Let's Pretend, it's often easy to see symbolism where none exists.

Everything I do is a metaphor of the universal order.

A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.

You can't create a movie as you think about it. And what's in the scene is not what's being seen. A shot always means something other than what it is. All are vehicles. A landscape is just a vehicle. The viewer might think different things, and I'm not going to intervene.

My joke is that my father was a minister and my mother was an English teacher, so I'm trained to see the world in terms of symbols, which is hard when you just want to make toast.

I'm perplexed, though, by your application of the term 'negative' to my figural imagery.

I think that's what poets try to do: They try to sidestep neurology and go straight to meaning.

There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street.

It is owing to our limitations that a thing appears to us as single and separate when in truth it is not a separate thing at all.

If you take a glass of water and separate it from its source - the ocean - then pour the water away from its source and ask it to sustain life, it flitters away. It just evaporates. It can't sustain life. That's a metaphor for us when we separate ourselves from our source and believe that God is separate from us.

What is remembered is not a deed in stone but a metaphor. Meta = above. Pheren = to carry. That which is carried above the literalness of life. A way of thinking that avoids the problems of gravity. The word won't let me down. The single word that can release me from all that unuttered weight.

If you are the lantern, I am the flame; If you are the lake, then I am the rain; If you are the desert, I am the sea; If you are the blossom, I am the bee; If you are the fruit, then I am the core; If you are the rock, then I am the ore; If you are the ballad, I am the word; If you are the sheath, then I am the sword.

If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper? ?To be? is to inter-be. We cannot just be by ourselves alone. We have to inter-be with every other thing. This sheet of paper is, because everything else is.

There are times when I catch myself believing that there is such a thing as something; which is separate from something else.

A metaphor is not an ornament. It is an organ of perception. Through metaphors, we see the world as one thing or another.

A powerful enough metaphor grows its own truth.

A poet once said, "The whole universe is in a glass of wine." We will probably never know in what sense he meant that, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe.

Metaphor creates a new reality from which the original appears to be unreal.

If you remember only one thing I've said, remember that an idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor. If you have never made a good metaphor, then you don't know what it's all about.

Just because something is a metaphor doesn't mean it can't be real.

There is not a fragment in all nature, for every relative fragment of one thing is a full harmonious unit in itself.

Everything in life is a metaphor.