Gestation Quotes

• Everything is gestation and then birthing.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Birthing

  Rainer Maria Rilke (2001). “Letters to a Young Poet”

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• There is a moment of conception and a moment of birth, but between them there is a long period of gestation.

  Jonas Salk

  Gestation Period, Long, Birth

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• Creativity - like human life itself - begins in darkness... bright ideas are preceded by a gestation period that is interior, murky, and completely necessary.

  Julia Cameron

  Creativity, Gestation Period, Ideas

  Julia Cameron (2012). “The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity”, p.248, Souvenir Press

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• Everything is gestation and bringing forth. To let each impression and each germ of feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own intelligence, and await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artist's life.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Humility, Dark, Artist

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• I consider the process of gestation just as important as when you're actually sitting down putting words to the paper.

  Wole Soyinka

  Writing, Important, Sitting Down

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• I think a film should have a gestation period of at least two or three years.

  Roland Joffe

  Thinking, Gestation Period, Should Have

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• Gestation requires protected space; ripening requires both permeability to the outer — and non-disturbance.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Space, Ripening, Disturbance

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• I know there are writers who get up every morning and sit by their typewriter or word processor or pad of paper and wait to write. I don't function that way. I go through a long period of gestation before I'm even ready to write.

  Wole Soyinka

  Morning, Writing, Typewriters

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• Literary history and the present are dark with silences . . . I have had special need to learn all I could of this over the years, myself so nearly remaining mute and having to let writing die over and over again in me. These are not natural silences--what Keats called agonie ennuyeuse (the tedious agony)--that necessary time for renewal, lying fallow, gestation, in the natural cycle of creation. The silences I speak of here are unnatural: the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot.

  Tillie Olsen

  Lying, Struggle, Writing

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• Problems, however, are rarely solved on the spur of the moment. They must be organized and dissected, then key issues isolated and defined. A period of gestation then sets in, during which these issues are mulled over. You put them in your mind and consciously or unconsciously work at them at odd hours of the day or night - even at work. It is somewhat analogous to trying to place a name on the face of someone you've met before. Often the solution to a problem comes to you in much the same way you eventually recall the name.

  William Redington Hewlett

  Night, Keys, Gestation Period

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• A writer works from the material she has, but it comes from the unconscious. Everything is stored up and one never knows what comes up to the surface at a given moment. A period of gestation is certainly needed, what Wordsworth called ‘emotion recollected in tranquility.’ You cannot write about an experience when you are living it, suffering it. You are too busy surviving to look at it objectively. At least I can’t.

  Rosamond Lehmann

  Writing, Gestation Period, Suffering

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• What's wrong with creative block? Might it not just be that periods--even extended ones--of productive hiatus are essential mechanisms of gestation designed to help us attain higher standards in our pursuit of creative excellence?

  Alexi Murdoch

  Block, Gestation Period, Creative

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• One nourishes one's created characters with one's own substance: it's rather like the process of gestation. To give the character life, or to give him back life, it is of course necessary to fortify him by contributing something of one's own humanity, but it doesn't follow from that that the character is I, the writer, or that I am the character. The two entities remain distinct.

  Marguerite Yourcenar

  Character, Two, Giving

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• There are some people the gestation period is like an elephant's and it's just years and years before they're ready.

  John Amaechi

  Gestation Period, Years, Elephants

  Interview with Max Miller, bigthink.com. October 7, 2010.

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• Everywhere revolutions are painful yet a fruitful gestation of people; they shed blood but create light, they eliminate men but elaborate ideas.

  Manuel Gonzalez Flores

  Men, Light, Blood

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• I like to know what the gestation of the idea is, I like to know the foundation, and I do a lot of reading and research.

  Kieran Bew

  Reading, Ideas, Foundation

  Source: collider.com

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• I think it was the perfect gestation time for this particular piece [ Sounds Like Me: My Life (So Far) in Song]. One of the songs that I considered talking about was "Manhattan," because it was chronicling the end of a long relationship that was part of the reason why I moved from Los Angeles to New York, which was such a life-changing decision. I don't regret that it's not in there, but that's one that I considered diving into, and I have little piecemeal snippets of writing about that floating around

  Sara Bareilles

  Song, New York, Regret

  Source: www.glamour.com

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• Despite the reams of paperwork, obstacles worthy of a horse show, and a wait that can rival an elephant's gestation, adoption feels no different on the inside.

  Scott Simon

  Horse, Elephants, Waiting

  Scott Simon (2010). “Baby, We Were Meant for Each Other: In Praise of Adoption”, p.76, Random House

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• Man, the most complicated of the animals, has a relatively short gestation period. Beyond that, he will be born, unlike most mammals, in a ridiculously helpless state.

  Willard Gaylin

  Animal, Men, Gestation Period

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• In the past we could afford a long gestation period before undertaking major environmental policy initiatives. Today the time for a well-planned transition to a sustainable system is running out. We may be moving in the right direction, but we are moving too slowly. We are failing in our responsibility to future generations and even the present one.

  Kofi Annan

  Running, Moving, Responsibility

  "Annan pleads with west as environment is pushed up UN agenda" by Ewen MacAskill, www.theguardian.com. March 14, 2001.

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• I never had children, never even thought I would have children. Now I have 152 daughters; expecting 75 more next year. That is some type of gestation period.

  Oprah Winfrey

  Mother, Daughter, Children

  "Child-Free Celebrities" by Diana Vilibert, www.marieclaire.com. August 11, 2010.

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• Men can become twins with age. The past was their common womb; the six months of rain and the six months of sun was the period of their common gestation. They needed only a few words and a few gestures to convey their meaning. They had graduated through the same fevers, they were moved by the same love and contempt.

  Graham Greene

  Love, Rain, Men

  Graham Greene (1973). “The Portable Graham Greene”

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• So something I've felt I've learned with The Cosmopolitans shoot is using some agility and changing things quickly. That's something I found really useful on this shoot too. The gestation of The Cosmopolitans and this are slightly different from my other films. The script would be done and I'd be cutting it, but I wasn't always writing new material.

  Whit Stillman

  Writing, Cutting, Different

  Source: collider.com

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• Look at Mann's reading habits, his explicit comments on Nietzsche, and his copy of Birth of Tragedy, and it starts to seem doubtful that this work of Nietzsche's played much role in the gestation of the novella.

  Philip Kitcher

  Reading, Tragedy, Roles

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• If anyone does not believe that Holy Mary is the Mother of God, he is severed from the Godhead. If anyone should assert that He passed through the Virgin as through a channel, and was not at once divinely and humanly formed in her (divinely, because without the intervention of a man; humanly, because in accordance with the laws of gestation), he is in like manner godless.

  Gregory of Nazianzus

  Mother, Religious, Believe

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