76 Quotes by Gail Godwin

The best antidote I have found is to yearn for something. As long as you yearn, you can’t congeal: There is a forward motion to yearning.

Something’s your vocation if it keeps making more of you.

Dreams say what they mean, but they don’t say it in daytime language.

You’re supposed to get tired planting bulbs. But it’s an agreeable tiredness.

How easy it was to make people happy, when you didn’t want or need anything from them.

The future arches above us all like a giant question mark, looming or embracing by whims and turns.

I work continuously within the shadow of failure. For every novel that makes it to my publisher’s desk, there are at least five or six that died on the way. And even with the ones I do finish, I think of all the ways they might have been better.

During the act of writing I have told myself something that I didn’t know I knew.

There are things we can’t undo, but perhaps there is a kind of constructive remorse that could transform regrettable acts into something of service to life.