Peter Elbow Quotes & Sayings

Everyone agrees in theory that we can't judge a new idea or point of view unless we enter into it and try it out, but the practice itself is rare. — Peter Elbow

The deepest dependency is not of students upon teachers, but of teachers upon students. — Peter Elbow

It is the moment when what was chaos is now seen as having a center of gravity. There is a shape where a moment ago there was none. — Peter Elbow

It's an unnecessary burden to try to think of words and also worry at the same time whether they're the right words. — Peter Elbow

Meaning is not what you start with, but what you end up with. — Peter Elbow

Writing with voice is writing into which someone has breathed. It has that fluency, rhythm, and liveliness that exist naturally in the speech of most people when they are enjoying a conversation ... Writing with real voice has the power to make you pay attention and understand
the words go deep. — Peter Elbow

Certainty is rarely if ever possible and we increase the likelihood of getting things wrong if we succumb to the hunger for it. — Peter Elbow

Producing writing is not so much like filling a basin or pool once, but rather getting water to keep flowing through till finally it runs clear. — Peter Elbow

One thinks about modern academics, especially philosophers and sociologists. Their language is often voiceless and without power because it is so utterly cut off from experience and things. There is no sense of words carrying experiences, only of reflecting relationships between other words or between "concepts." There is no sense of an actual self seeing a thing or having an experience... Sociology - by its very nature? - seems to be an enterprise whose practitioners cut themselves off from experience and things and deal entirely with categories about categories. As a result sociologists, more even than writers in other disciplines, often write language which has utterly died — Peter Elbow

The question for writing then is this: how long are you willing to be unheard? — Peter Elbow