Deena Metzger famous quotes

03-28-2025

Beauty appears when something is completely and absolutely and openly itself.
-- Deena Metzger

#Beauty
Stories move in circle.Â They donâ€™t move in straight lines.Â So it helps if you listen in circles.Â There are stories inside stories and stories between stories and finding your way through them is as easy and as hard as finding your way home.Â And part of the finding is the getting lost.Â And when youâ€™re lost you start to look around and to listen.
-- Deena Metzger

#Moving #Home #Circles
Write against patterns. Go against the devils. Write what you never write. Lie. Validate what you donâ€™t validate. Indulge what you donâ€™t like. Wallow in it. Write the opposite of what you always write, think, speak. Do everything against the grain!
-- Deena Metzger

#Lying #Writing #Thinking
Stories heal us because we become whole through them. In the process of writing, of discovering our story, we restore those parts of ourselves that have been scattered, hidden, suppressed, denied, distorted, forbidden, and we come to understand that stories heal.
-- Deena Metzger

#Writing #Stories #Process
When Stories nestle in the body, soul comes forth.
-- Deena Metzger

#Soul #Stories #Body
To follow Story is to understand the path of healing. Each of our stories is a universe. Each one of us is living a story. To discover its shape and essence is essential to soul making.
-- Deena Metzger

#Healing #Essence #Soul
A sacred illness is one that educates us and alters us from the inside out, provides experiences and therefore knowledge that we could not possibly achieve in any other way, and aligns us with a life path that is, ultimately, of benefit to ourselves and those around us.
-- Deena Metzger

#Way #Path #Benefits
One cannot really know an other without intimacy. Detached, objective observations alone leave a surface upon which it is too easy to project one's own image or fantasies. In intimacy, one respectfully interacts with the other, invites the penetration of the other, enters into a common effort, and then the strange and distinct contours of self and other become more apparent.
-- Deena Metzger

#Self #Effort #Strange
Creating art and creating ourselves are the same act; art, world, ourselves - these are continuous with one another.
-- Deena Metzger

#Art #Creativity #Creating
The gods come to us in the forms we recognize.
-- Deena Metzger

#God #Form
The world of public discourse - political, social, diplomatic, commercial - has so corrupted language that we are rightly more suspicious of the meaning of words than we are convinced of their veracity. Language has been turned on its head.
-- Deena Metzger

#Political #World #Language
There are mythic patterns under all of our lives. Each one of us, often unbeknownst to ourselves, is engaged in a drama of soul that is not reserved only for gods, heroes, and saints. Story is one bridge between the human realm and the divine.
-- Deena Metzger

#Drama #Hero #Bridges
For those who are intrigued by the multiplicity of reality and the unique possibilities of their own vision, the creative is the path they must pursue.
-- Deena Metzger

#Unique #Reality #Creative
Some people fear seeing or feeling anything about which there is no general agreement. For others, it is thrilling to be aware of innuendo, shading, complexity.
-- Deena Metzger

#Fear #Agreement #People
For those who do not wish to step away from consensus, the creative is useless at best; at worst, it is dangerous.
-- Deena Metzger

#Creative #Wish #Useless
We want to be God in all the ways that are not the ways of God, in what we hope is indestructible or unmoving. But God is the most fragile, a bare smear of pollen, that scatter of yellow dust from the tree that tumbled over in the storm of my grief and planted itself again. God is the death agony of the frog that cannot find water in the time of the drought we created. God is the scream of the rabbit caught in the fires we set. God is the One whose eyes never close and who hears everything.
-- Deena Metzger

#Grief #Eye #Yellow
To be willing to live within the imagination is to commit oneself to the gathering together of the pieces that might begin to form a self. To avoid this territory is to avoid the encounters that might validate, inform, or enhance one's experience.
-- Deena Metzger

#Self #Imagination #Together
Eighty percent of language lies to us.
-- Deena Metzger

#Lying #Language
This is our grace: To be a note In the exact chord that animates creation.
-- Deena Metzger

#Grace #Creation #Notes
Without compassion, we will never know anyone or anything, not even our own story. Too much judgment, too many ideas and attitudes will stand in the way of the fundamental principle that we are similar to, connected with, and part of everything else.
-- Deena Metzger

#Attitude #Compassion #Ideas

You may also like:

Anne Lamott
Novelist
Annie Dillard
Author
Brenda Ueland
Journalist
Cheri Huber
Author
Chogyam Trungpa
Teacher
Dorothea Brande
Writer
Francine Prose
Writer
Jack Kornfield
Author
Joan Halifax
Anthropologist
John Daido Loori
Author
Julia Cameron
Teacher
Lynne Truss
Writer
Naomi Shihab Nye
Poet
Natalie Goldberg
Author
Nhat Hanh
Monk
Pema Chodron
Nun
Shunryu Suzuki
William Strunk, Jr.
Professor
William Zinsser
Writer
Barbara Myerhoff
Anthropologist