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Everyone is flailing through this life without an owner's manual, with whatever modicum of grace and good humor we can manage.

Anne Lamott

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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Whatever
Flailing
Everyone
Manual
Without
Manuals
Good
Owner
Life
Owners
Manage
Humor
Grace
Modicum

More quotes by Anne Lamott

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by then I'd figured out the gift of failure, which is that it breaks through all that held breath and isometric tension about needing to look good: it's the gift of feeling floppier.
Anne Lamott
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My experience as a writer is that you really do write seven and eight pages to find the paragraph you were after all along.
Anne Lamott
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Many mornings I check out the news as soon as I wake up, because if it turns out that the world is coming to an end that day, I am going to eat the frosting off an entire carrot cake just for a start. Then I will move onto vats of clam dip, pots of crime brûlée, nachos, M & M's etc. Then I will max out both my credit cards.
Anne Lamott
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These days cry out, as never before, for us to pay attention, so we can move through them and get our joy and pride back.
Anne Lamott
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The reason 'help' is such a great prayer is that God is the gift of desperation. When you're in despair, you're teachable.
Anne Lamott
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Everything was coming together by coming apart . . . It is the most difficult Zen practice to leave people to their destiny, even though it's painful - just loving them, and breathing with them, and distracting them in a sweet way, and laughing with them . . . if something was not my problem, I probably did not have the solution.
Anne Lamott
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It's intrusive for grandparents to think they're in charge. It's manipulative. Also, it's self-destructive, since if the parents have to resist you, you won't get your mitts on the kid as often.
Anne Lamott
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We begin to find and become ourselves when we notice how we are already found, already truly, entirely, wildly, messily, marvelously who we were born to be.
Anne Lamott
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What’s the difference between you and God? God never thinks he’s you.
Anne Lamott
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Writing is about hypnotizing yourself into believing in yourself, getting some work done, then unhypnotizing yourself and going over the material coldly.
Anne Lamott
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Good writing is about telling the truth.
Anne Lamott
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Getting into a new relationship is like pouring Miracle-Gro on your character defects.
Anne Lamott
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Sometimes it feels like God has reached down and touched me, blessed me a thousand times over, and sometimes it all feels like a mean joke, like God's advisers are Muammar Qaddafi and Phyllis Schlafly.
Anne Lamott
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Nothing heals us like letting people know our scariest parts: When people listen to you cry and lament, and look at you with love, it's like they are holding the baby of you.
Anne Lamott
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I'm not going to change the way people think about me, but I can say you know what? I'm not going to carry that in my backpack.
Anne Lamott
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A hundred years from now? All new people.
Anne Lamott
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When we agree to being part of something bigger than our own wired, fixated minds, we are saved.
Anne Lamott
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Why couldn't Jesus command us to obsess over everything, to try to control and manipulate people, to try not to breathe at all, or to pay attention, stomp away to brood when people annoy us, and then eat a big bag of Hershey's Kisses in bed?
Anne Lamott
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Don’t underestimate this gift of finding a place in the writing world: if you really work at describing creatively on paper the truth as you understand it, as you have experienced it, with the people or material who are in you, who are asking that you help them get written, you will come to a secret feeling of honor.
Anne Lamott
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Some people won't go the extra mile, and then on their birthday, when no one makes a fuss, they feel neglected and bitter.
Anne Lamott