Natalie Goldberg Quotes

I wish I could shut up, but I can't, and I won't.

I speak as I must and cannot be silent.

We grow up hungry for love, and in ways so deep as to remain unexpressed we long for our Maker to love us.

“Who are you?” One who has waited long for you to speak.

Maybe sadness was a kind of hunger, she thought. Maybe the two went together.

I’ve always wanted to be liked. It grieved me that I was treated with indifference. Left an orphan by Fortune, I wanted—like all orphans—to be the object of someone’s affection. This need has always been a hunger that went unsatisfied, and so thoroughly have I adapted to this inevitable hunger that I sometimes wonder if I really feel the need to eat. Whatever be the case, life pains me.

Sometimes, language is the sound of longing

Small sorrows speak great ones are silent.

Sometimes when relationships end, you write an e-mail and say everything you wish you said. Sometimes you don't push send.

And there, in that phrase, the bitterness leaks again out of my pen. What a dull lifeless quality this bitterness is. If I could I would write with love, but if I could write with love I would be another man; I would never have lost love.

I cut myself because you wouldn't let me cry. I cried because you wouldn't let me speak. I spoke because you wouldn't let me shine. I shone because I thought you loved me.

I've got the hungries for your love and I'm waiting in your welfare line.

Silence augmenteth grief, writing increaseth rage

She realized that being starved for words was the same as being starved for food, because both left a hollow place inside you, a place you needed filled to make it through another day. Rachel remembered how growing up she’d thought living on a farm with just a father was as lonely as you could be. (130)

I had to wait for someone special. Someone who would make my heart feel as if it's been trampled by elephants, thrown into the amazon, and eaten by piranhas.

Sometimes when we touch..The honesty's too much, and I have to close my eyes and hide. I want to hold you till I die, 'til we both break down and cry, I want to hold you till this fear in me subsides.

And wilt thou have me fashion into speech The love I bear thee, finding words enough, And hold the torch out, while the winds are rough, Between our faces, to cast light on each? - I dropt it at thy feet. I cannot teach My hand to hold my spirits so far off From myself--me--that I should bring thee proof In words, of love hid in me out of reach. Nay, let the silence of my womanhood Commend my woman-love to thy belief, - Seeing that I stand unwon, however wooed, And rend the garment of my life, in brief, By a most dauntless, voiceless fortitude, Lest one touch of this heart convey its grief.

Dumbledore had not raised his voice, he did not even sound angry, but Harry would have preferred him to yell; this cold disappointment was worse than anything.

The truth hurts, but silence kills.

Bean could see the hunger in their eyes. Not the regular hunger, for food, but the real hunger, the deep hunger, for family, for love, for belonging.

Why must you speak your thoughts? Silence, if fair words stick in your throat, would serve all our ends better.

...the air so still it aches like the place where the tooth was on the morning after you’ve been to the dentist or aches like your heart in the bosom when you stand on the street corner waiting for the light to change and happen to recollect how things once were and how they might have been yet if what happened had not happened.

The theater is a communal event, like church. The playwright constructs a mass to be performed for a lot of people. She writes a prayer, which is really just the longings of one heart.

My tears speak for me.