Brenda Ueland Quotes

My brain kind of rolls pretty fast when I'm conscious. It's constantly looking for stuff to do. Like if I'm in my house and I'm hanging out, I tend to be listening to music whilst watching a film whilst sending e-mails.

How time files when you's doin' all the talking.

It's hard to watch something go on and be talking at the same time.

You ain't learning nothing when you're talking.

There's so much interference, so much static and people's voices talking about what you do and why you do it that I've learned to be like, 'No, no.' It's actually simple. I just do this.

We are too connected. There's noise in our heads all the time.

A passionate obsession with the outside world or the private lives of others is an attempt to compensate for a lack of meaning in one's own life

For many of us, the opposite of talking isn't listening. It's waiting. When others speak, we typically divide our attention between what they're saying now and what we're going to say next - and end up doing a mediocre job at both.

I am interested in a hundred things, but only slightly.

Avoid such situations in which you are unnecessarily burdened with rubbish. You already have too much as it is, you need to be unburdened of it. And you go on collecting it as if it is something precious. Talk less, listen only to the essential, be telegraphic in talking and listening. If you talk less, if you listen less, slowly slowly you will see that a cleanliness, a feeling of purity, as if you have just taken a bath, will start arising within you. That becomes the necessary soil for meditation to arise. Don't go on reading all kinds of nonsense.

How can you read and talk at the same time?” I asked. “Well, I usually can’t, but neither the book nor the conversation is particularly intellectually challenging.

One thing talk can't accomplish is communication. This is because everybody's talking too much to pay attention to what anyone is saying

You just ignore it! It's not that you don't care anymore, it's that you stop listening and paying attention to it. Because everybody has an opinion. Talk is cheap - it's free! And I say that like, if you don't like the stuff I have to say, pay me no mind - it will cost you nothing.

If I'm at somebody's house and they have magazines on the table and people are chatting, I feel almost a physical urge to start reading the magazines instead of talking to people.

People don't listen, they just wait for their turn to talk.

The only reason your mind won't stop its endless chattering is because you won't stop listening to it!

Everyone striving to be witty and sought-after, everyone talking and no one listening.

Constant talkers are unheard.

The first evil those who are prone to talk suffer, is that they hear nothing.

The talkative listen to no one, for they are ever speaking. And the first evil that attends those who know not to be silent is that they hear nothing.

You have to remember that it is impossible to commit a crime while reading a book.

Antonio- "Just in time, Pete. Five more minutes of reading this and she'd have been in a coma." Peter- "Are we such bad company that you'd rather hide out in here reading that old thing?

I don't like phones. You can't be sure people are paying attention to you when you're talking to them.

Particularly when I thought of myself as a Wallace Stevens acolyte, I wrote very difficult poetry and I was really guilty of not knowing what I was talking about. I was going for a kind of clever verbal effect. I was trying to sound linguistically or verbally interesting. I had a sense, I guess, from just reading a lot of poetry of how a poem would start and how it would end but really I didn't know what I was doing. It had very little connection to my life.

Read o'er this And after, this, and then to breakfast with What appetite you have.