Gail Godwin

“I contemplated how I was going to get through the rest of the day and felt the onset of a terror I…

— Gail Godwin

“People commit thousands of small suicides every day that go unnoticed”

— Gail Godwin

There are two kinds of people. One kind, you can just tell by looking at them at what point they congealed into…

— Gail Godwin

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

— Gail Godwin

None of us suddenly becomes something overnight. The preparations have been in the making for lifetime.

— 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…

— Gail Godwin

“Other people don’t exist when you’re not with them.”

— Gail Godwin

I read constantly. If I don't have a good book, I'm beside myself.

— Gail Godwin

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

— Gail Godwin

The characters that I create are parts of myself and I send them on little missions to find out what I don’t…

— Gail Godwin

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

— Gail Godwin

“Yes, if you believed in words, if you lived by words, you had better be careful which words you say and how…

— Gail Godwin

I'm always aware that I risk being taken for a neurasthenic prima donna when I explain to someone who wants 'just a…

— Gail Godwin

I believe that with enough practice and good faith, you can learn to recognize when the work is achieved.

— Gail Godwin

If there is such a thing as sin in this world, I think it must be shutting oneself up against hope.

— Gail Godwin

The race of children possesses magically sagacious powers.

— Gail Godwin

“In friendships . . . the requisits are always the same. Each provides the other with a refuge in time of trouble,…

— Gail Godwin

“Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater.”

— Gail Godwin

What did a few ripples in the flesh matter when, all too soon, now or later, that flesh would be making its…

— Gail Godwin

The more you respect and focus on the singular and the strange, the more you become aware of the universal and infinite.

— Gail Godwin

Heroics are not easily had for the young in our times. Perhaps that is why they go to such extremes to create…

— Gail Godwin

The act of longing for something will always be more intense than the requiting of it.

— Gail Godwin

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

— Gail Godwin

At times ... one is downright thankful for the self-absorption of other people.

— Gail Godwin

Much of the activity we think of as writing is, actually, getting ready to write.

— Gail Godwin