Quotes from Carol Berg

But I found steel beneath his soft-spoken manner. I could not break him. Despite his struggles with the tasks I set him, he lived with everything of gentleness and grace.

Humility is a difficult lesson.

I tried to think of something equally kind to say, but he seemed to have used up all the eloquence in the room.

We all do as we're told but some days it doesn't seem to matter.

We begin our naming. The names drop into greens that tighten. Greens that deepen. The wind has begun its relentless thinking. Now the red veins in the small burrowed creatures begin their murmur. How the urgency of this red spurts inside us. Another eye wills itself open. Another eye roves.

Our regret would not change what had happened, only make our grief for the big laughing youth more bitter.

It was impossible to fight any battle without purpose. It was your anchor. Your focus. The place you could fasten everything you had to remember.

I was not wholly irreverent. I honored all gods who professed an interest in human folk, and I respected custom and rituals that evoked the great mysteries of the world: death and birth, forests, ocean, and storms, music, copulation, and fermentation.

Write. Write. Write. Learn how to revise. No story is perfect straight from the keyboard.

Writing is communication, and you don't know how you're doing until you put it in front of someone else's eyes. You also learn from critiquing other writers' work.