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Left to my own devices, my first inclination is to mess in other people's lives. I secretly believe my whole family, and really the whole world, is my responsibility.
Anne Lamott
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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Really
Responsibility
World
Family
People
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More quotes by Anne Lamott
The first draft is the child's draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later.
Anne Lamott
Age has given me the gift of me it just gave me what I was always longing for, which was to get to be the woman I've already dreamt of being. Which is somebody who can do rest and do hard work and be a really constant companion, a constant, tender-hearted wife to myself.
Anne Lamott
And as it turns out, if one person is praying for you, buckle up. Things can happen.
Anne Lamott
No matter what circumstances, it's hard to be a parent and maintain a sense of self and identity in the world.
Anne Lamott
You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.
Anne Lamott
Living on Earth has always been a dangerous way to spend your time.
Anne Lamott
Reading poetry and reading the great works of the canon that we were reading in the '60s and the '70s and '80s was mind altering.
Anne Lamott
I was raised by my parents to believe that you had a moral obligation to try and help save the world.
Anne Lamott
To be a good writer, you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care. You do not have to have a complicated moral philosophy. But a writer always tries, I think, to be a part of a solution, to understand a little about life and to pass this on.
Anne Lamott
Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something—anything—down on paper. What I’ve learned to do when I sit down to work on a shitty first draft is to quiet the voices in my head.
Anne Lamott
Jealousy has always been my cross, the weakness and woundedness in me that has most often caused me to feel ugly and unlovable, like the Bad Seed.
Anne Lamott
I am not writing to try and convert people to fundamental Christianity. I am just trying to share my experience, strength and hope, that someone who is as messed up and neurotic and scarred and scared can be fully accepted by our dear Lord, no questions asked.
Anne Lamott
I'm very successful, but there are 50,000 general interest books published every year. If you don't want to read mine, there are others.
Anne Lamott
When we're dealing with the people in our family - no matter how annoying or gross they may be, no matter how self-inflicted their suffering may appear, no matter how afflicted they are with ignorance, prejudice or nose hairs - we give from the deepest parts of ourselves.
Anne Lamott
Forgiveness means it finally becomes unimportant that you hit back.
Anne Lamott
Grief is just so scary.... If we finally begin to cry all those suppressed tears, they will surely wash us away like the Mississippi River. That's what our parents told us. We got sent to our rooms for having huge feelings. In my family, if you cried or got angry, you didn't get dinner.
Anne Lamott
My main problem is that over and over again, I try to get all my characters to say stuff that I think is so witty or erudite you know, so that everybody will go.
Anne Lamott
I wish grace and healing were more abracadabra kind of things. Also, that delicate silver bells would ring to announce grace's arrival. But no, it's clog and slog and scootch, on the floor, in the silence, in the dark.
Anne Lamott
If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. Otherwise, you'll just be rearranging furniture in rooms you've already been in.
Anne Lamott
I was usually filled with a sense of something like shame until I'd remember that wonderful line of Blake's- that we are here to learn to endure the beams of love- and I would take a long deep breath and force these words out of my strangulated throat: Thank you.
Anne Lamott