Quotes About Inspiration

All art is made from anger.

Experiencing sadness and anger can make you feel more creative, and by being creative, you can get beyond your pain or negativity.

Rage is to writers what water is to fish.

Writing directly from a feeling of anger or sadness is difficult, but if you distract part of your brain with word games, the ignored emotion often tiptoes in.

There's always been anger in the making of music or literature or dance.

Sometimes I fall back pretty hard on the butterflies and the flowers. What a privilege to have been around for this.

Young lovers see a vision of the world redeemed by love.

It is not from ourselves that we will learn to be better than we are.

And his words fell upon the table like a blessing.

The walls of the rational, empirical world are famously porous. What come through are dreams, imaginings, inspirations, visions, revelations. There is no use in stooping over these with a magnifying lens.

As I went about my work then as a young woman, and still now when I am old, Grandmam has been often close to me in my thoughts. And again I come to the difficulty of finding words. It is hard to say what it means to be at work and thinking of a person you loved and love still who did that same work before you and who taught you to do it. It is a comfort ever and always, like hearing the rhyme come when you are singing a song.

It is the privilege and the labor of the apprentice of creation to come with his imagination into the unimaginable, and with his speech into the unspeakable.

I go free from the tasks and intentions of my workdays, and so my mind becomes hospitable to unintended thoughts: to what I am very willing to call inspiration.

Even while I dreamed I prayed that what I saw was only fear and no foretelling

Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came.

For a long time then I seemed to live by the slender thread of faith, spun out from within me. From this single thread I spun strands that joined me to the good things of the world. And then I spun more threads that joined all the strands together, making a life.

To be creative is only to have health: to keep oneself fully alive in the Creation, to keep the Creation fully alive in oneself, to see the Creation anew, to welcome one's part in it anew.

And yet for a long time, looking back, I have been unable to shake off the feeling that I have been led—make of that what you will.

In general, I weathered even the worst sermons pretty well. They had the great virtue of causing my mind to wander. Some of the best things I have ever thought of I have thought of during bad sermons.

No one has made the art by which one makes the works of art. Each one who speaks speaks as a convocation. We live as councils of ghosts. It is not human genius that makes us human, but an old love, an old intelligence of the heart we gather to us from the world, from the creatures, from the angels of inspiration, from the dead-- an intelligence merely nonexistent to those who do not have it, but -- to those who have it more dear than life.

VI We travelers, walking to the sun, can't see Ahead, but looking back the very light That blinded us shows us the way we came, Along which blessings now appear, risen As if from sightlessness to sight, and we, By blessing brightly lit, keep going toward That blessed light that yet to us is dark.

My mother used to read to me every night when I was little. We got through most of the major fantasy books of that time. The Narnia books by C.S. Lewis were my favorites and, later, Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. I started making dolls to fill in the gaps of the dolls I had. Obviously we couldn't buy centaurs and fauns and elves and fairies, so I made them to play with the normal dolls I had. I must have been about six years old when I started making fantasy dolls.

I'm so involved in the process that sometimes at the end of a day, I can look at the piece on my desk and really wonder how it got there. At other times, I really have to struggle with a piece to turn it into what I had in mind. Sometimes, I give up and leave it half finished to work on something else. Then in a few days, when I come back to it, I can see what it wants to be... which sometimes is not at all what I had in mind. When I just let that happen, things seem to go more smoothly.

I suppose I was artistic as a child. Our house was so full of art and artists that it never occurred to me not to be constantly making things. I just assumed that all kids liked to work with their hands as much as I did. I was an only child so I did have a lot of time to be creative by myself and with my parents.