Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

by Natalie Goldberg

Accept loss forever Be submissive to everything, open, listening No fear or shame in the dignity of your experience, language, and knowledge Be in love with your life

This book is about writing. It is also about using writing as your practice, as a way to help you penetrate your life and become sane.

The world is not permanent, is everchanging and full of human suffering. So if you express something egoless, it is also full of energy because it is expressing the truth of the way things are.

“Talk when you talk, walk when you walk, and die when you die.”

Become big and write with the whole world in your arms.

If they knock you down, you get up. If they knock you down again, get up. No matter how many times they knock you down, get up again. That is how you should go.”

Think of writing as though it were breathing. Just because you have to plant a garden or take the subway or teach a class, you don’t stop inhaling and exhaling.

when you go over your work, become a Samurai, a great warrior with the courage to cut out anything that is not present.