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Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.

Anne Lamott

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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Almost
Start
Firsts
Need
Efforts
First
Begins
Needs
Somewhere
Writing
Terrible
Good
Effort

More quotes by Anne Lamott

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Perfection is shallow, unreal, and fatally uninteresting.
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Can you imagine the hopelessness of trying to live a spiritual life when you’re secretly looking up at the skies not for illumination or direction, but to gauge, miserably, the odds of rain?
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You fall so deeply in love with your grandbaby. It's so so so much easier than being a parent, because you really don't have much responsibility. And just when you are at the end of your rope with exhaustion, the parents take the baby away. So it's the best of both worlds.
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Everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, and scared, even the people who seem to have it more or less together.
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My deepest belief is that to live as if we're dying can set us free. Dying people teach you to pay attention and to forgive and not to sweat the small things.
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They always threw their arms around and hugged me while crying our Yiddish endearments. Yet none of them believed in God. They believed in social justice, good works, Israel, and Bette Midler. I was nearly thirty before I met a religious Jew.
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Small is how blessings, healing, progress and increase occur.
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It's better to be kind than to be right.
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I'm human, you're human, let me greet your humanness. Let's be people together for a while.
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Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don't drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor's yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper.
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My family tends to be pretty alcoholic and drug-addicted.
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I cry intermittently, like a summer rain. I don't feel racked by the crying in fact, it hydrates me. Then rage wells up in me, and I want to take a crowbar to all the cars in the neighborhood.
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A big heart is both a clunky and a delicate thing it doesn't protect itself and it doesn't hide. It stands out, like a baby's fontanel, where you can see the soul pulse through.
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The opposite of faith is not doubt, it’s certainty.
Anne Lamott
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I love readings and my readers, but the din of voices of the audience gives me stage fright, and the din of voices inside whisper that I am a fraud, and that the jig is up. Surely someone will rise up from the audience and say out loud that not only am I not funny and helpful, but I'm annoying, and a phony.
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Never compare your insides to everyone else's outsides.
Anne Lamott
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I think this is how we are supposed to be in the world-present and in awe.
Anne Lamott
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Shirley Jackson said that a confused reader is an antagonistic reader, and I live by that. It's okay to start anywhere, and to let yourself write a big sloppy overly-detailed first draft. You just jump in, knowing that the water will be cold at first, but no one is making you swim.
Anne Lamott
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I did not raise my son, Sam, to celebrate Mother's Day. I didn't want him to feel some obligation to buy me pricey lunches or flowers, some annual display of gratitude that you have to grit your teeth and endure.
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I didn't need to understand the hypostatic unity of the Trinity I just needed to turn my life over to whoever came up with redwood trees.
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