Sophy Burnham quotes:

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.

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.

Angels come in all sizes and shapes and colors, visible and invisible to the physical eye. But always you are changed from having seen one.

Sometimes writer's block is no more than a signal that you have not done enough research.

We all have angels guiding us...They look after us. They heal us, touch us, comfort us with invisible warm hands...What will bring their help? Asking. Giving thanks.

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.'

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.

Writing is so hard.... The first draft writing is so hard that sometimes in the beginning, before the work itself takes over, carrying you on its flood, you must give yourself rewards. "When I write this chapter, I can call my boyfriend." "When I finish one page more, I can get an ice cream cone." "If I write this section, I'll find a check in the mail."

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....

Coincidence is God's way of performing miracles anonymously.

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.

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

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.

... 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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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