We write to understand our deepest secrets to ourselves, to understand. We write in an outpouring of love. We write in secret, either for publication or for a journal no one will see, or we write poems to be privately printed for the eyes of friends alone - this is not our choice. The urge is to create. The outcome belongs to God.

Sophy Burnham

Categorized in : Writing Choices Eye

To believe in God or in a guiding force because someone tells you to is the height of stupidity. We are given senses to receive our information within. With our own eyes we see, and with our own skin we feel. With our intelligence, it is intended that we understand. But each person must puzzle it out for himself or herself.

Sophy Burnham

stupidity eye believe

I think our animals are angels, earth-angels, pointing out for us the steadfast path of love, loyalty, optimism, faith, joy, hope. They teach us everything important about life.

Sophy Burnham

loyalty angel thinking

There are so many different kinds of writing and so many ways to work that the only rule is this: do what works. Almost everything has been tried and found to succeed for somebody. The methods, even the ideas of successful writers contradict each other in a most heartening way, and the only element I find common to all successful writers is persistence-an overwhelming determination to succeed.

Sophy Burnham

determination successful writing

It is said that angels come as thoughts, as visions, as dreams, as animals, as the light on the water or in clouds and rainbows, and as people too. Are they walking on this earth as people in disguise? Or do they appear for that one moment and vanish into ether again? Or is it really us, mere humans, who for a moment are picked up by the hand of God and made to speak unwittingly the words another needs to hear, or to hold out a life line to another soul?

Sophy Burnham

angel dream animal

Prayer is a law of the universe, like gravity. You don't even have to believe in God to ask.

Sophy Burnham

prayer law believe

Coincidence is God's way of performing miracles anonymously.

Sophy Burnham

miracle way religion

prayer is nothing more than thought. It is a yearning of the heart.

Sophy Burnham

yearning prayer heart

no one who has seen an angel ever mistakes it for a ghost. Angels are remarkable for their warmth and light, and all who see them speak in awe of their irridescent and refulgent light, of brilliant colors, or else of the unbearable whiteness of their being. You are flooded with laughter, happiness.

Sophy Burnham

laughter angel mistake

Angels live no place, as God lives no place. They live in the space of eternity, in the center of our hearts, and sometimes I think we each serve as the channels and angels of God, touched by wings of silence, pushed to angelic acts.

Sophy Burnham

angel heart thinking

A shiver runs down your spine when you realize it is not our imagination. Something is watching us out there.

Sophy Burnham

angel imagination running

I have a lion inside me, and I had to feed it words every few days; when I don't, it begins to eat me instead.

Sophy Burnham

lions

The urge is to create. The outcome belongs to God.

Sophy Burnham

urges creativity outcomes

When I'm having trouble I write by hand. There is some connection between the mind and the fingers that draws out words.

Sophy Burnham

mind writing hands

Harriet Beecher Stowe thought Uncle Tom's Cabin was written through her by Another Hand, so little did she know what was going to happen from moment to moment in the book. She herself was amazed at what she was writing.

Sophy Burnham

uncles writing book

A guest at a dinner party observed the strange expression on James Thurber's face. 'Don't be concerned,' said Thurber's wife. 'He's writing.'

Sophy Burnham

party expression writing

Harriet Beecher Stowe was thirty-nine when she began Uncle Tom's Cabin. She had given birth to seven children and seen one die. She wrote her book to be serialized in an abolitionist newspaper. Much of it she composed on the kitchen table in between the cooking, mending, tending to her house.

Sophy Burnham

uncles book children

... where do they go when they die? We hear of the elephant graveyards, where the elephants go to die, but how much more curious it is that birds are not falling out of the sky all the time, on our heads, at our feet, dying and falling and flopping to the ground. I rarely see a dead bird on the ground.

Sophy Burnham

elephants sky fall

So loving is the universe, so joyful, so determined to give us everything we need and to love us and show us the way to live, too, that we are beaten to the ground, boiled by God's waves, as we play in the surf.

Sophy Burnham

play giving needs

Where do you put your attention? On fear or love? I wish the choice were made just once and not repeated every moment of the day.

Sophy Burnham

choices fear wish

That's the true sign. If the lover has not yet achieved his prize, his eyes will follow the woman, while she appears indifferent. But once he's gained his goal, it's the woman's eyes that follow him, while the man seems careless and indifferent.

Sophy Burnham

eye goal men