"Don't Be Afraid To Be Amazing."
In an interview, Irwin described a late night conversation at a Waffle House that he had with Cyndi Craven (a friend, musician and Irwin's website designer):
. . . and I was talking about what I have to tell myself all the time when I'm afraid about doing something that hasn't been done before because it really is frightening to step out and do something different. So I will tell myself, "Don’t be afraid to be amazing". Cyndi said, "Where did you get that?" I said, "I made it up".
Craven subsequently posted the quotation on the internet and it now appears on dozens of websites including the quotation search-tools Think Exist and Famous Quotes plus various other websites such as the social networking website Gaia Community, the New Age site Beyond the Rainbow and numerous personal websites.
Irwin's quotation was chosen to be the message of the murals created by artist Susan Guevara for the post-Katrina renovation of the New Orleans Children’s Resource Center branch library. Irwin also uses the quotation as a title of a storytelling workshop that he teaches to adults.
Read more about this topic: Andy Offutt Irwin
Famous quotes containing the words afraid and/or amazing:
“A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. It is barely domesticated, a mustang on which you one day fastened a halter, but which now you cannot catch. It is a lion you cage in your study. As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room.”
—Annie Dillard (b. 1945)
“Central heating, French rubber goods, and cookbooks are three amazing proofs of man’s ingenuity in transforming necessity into art, and of these, cookbooks are perhaps most lastingly delightful.”
—M.F.K. Fisher (b. 1908)