Arthur Gordon Quotes

Let’s not be too harsh where poets are concerned. They have to live in no-man’s-land, halfway between dreams and reality.

You’re thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn’t at all. Failure is a teacher – a harsh one, perhaps, but the best. You say you have a desk full of rejected manuscripts? That’s great! Every one of those manuscripts was rejected for a reason. Have you pulled them to pieces looking for that reason? You’ve got to put failure to work for you. That’s where you’ll find success. On the far side of failure.

Words. Just little black marks on paper. Just sounds in the empty air. But think of the power they have! They can make you laugh or cry, love or hate, fight or run away. They can heal or hurt. They even come to look and sound like what they mean. Angry looks angry on the page. Ugly sounds ugly when you say it.

Rhythm. Life is full of it; words should have it, too. But you have to train your ear. Listen to the waves on a quiet night; you’ll pick up the cadence. Look at the patterns the wind makes in dry sand and you’ll see how syllables in a sentence should fall. Arthur Gordon

Some people confuse acceptance with apathy but there's all the difference in the world. Apathy fails to distinguish between what can and what cannot be helped acceptance makes that distinction. Apathy paralyzes the will-to-action acceptance frees it by relieving it of impossible burdens.

(It’s) a fair exchange. You’re giving me attention. That’s a form of affection, you know.

There was something about him that drove the shyness out of you, a kind of understanding that went deeper than words and set up an instantaneous closeness. It was odd; we couldn’t have been more different. Arthur Gordon

It’s the person who likes to pat dogs to whom dogs come for pats.

Some criticism, no doubt, is constructive, but too much is a subtle poison.

The trouble with ‘if only’ is that it doesn’t change anything. It keeps the person facing the wrong way – backward instead of forward. It wastes time. In the end, if you let it become a habit, it can become a real roadblock – an excuse for not trying anymore.