Quote

We write to expose the unexposed. If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. The writer's job is to turn the unspeakable into words - not just into any words, but if we can, into rhythm and blues.

Anne Lamott

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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Write
Door
Must
Doors
Writing
Writer
Castle
Told
Unspeakable
Turn
Expose
Turns
Castles
Words
Blues
Jobs
Rhythm

More quotes by Anne Lamott

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if you want to know how God feels about money, look at whom she gives it to.
Anne Lamott
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If I have a huge audience, I'd like a bigger audience maybe slightly a slightly more illustrious audience.
Anne Lamott
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You are going to have to give and give and give, or there's no reason for you to be writing. You have to give from the deepest part of yourself, and you are going to have to go on giving, and the giving is going to have to be its own reward. There is no cosmic importance to your getting something published, but there is in learning to be a giver.
Anne Lamott
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When hope is not pinned wriggling onto a shiny image or expectation, it sometimes floats forth and opens.
Anne Lamott
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Dogs are the closest we come to knowing the divine love of God on this side of eternity.
Anne Lamott
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Honesty is not necessarily interesting. I don't want to hear about your dreams or your acid trips, probably unless you make them really interesting.
Anne Lamott
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It is in many people's best interest for you not to find yourself, but it only matters that it is in yours, and the whole world's, to proceed.
Anne Lamott
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Any plot you impose on your characters will be onomatopoetic: PLOT. I say don't worry about plot. Worry about the characters. Let what they say or do reveal who they are, and be involved in their lives, and keep asking yourself, Now what happens? The development of relationship creates plot.
Anne Lamott
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No one tells you that your life is effectively over when you have a child: that you're never going to draw another complacent breath again... or that whatever level of hypochondria and rage you'd learned to repress and live with is going to seem like the good old days.
Anne Lamott
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I love memoirs. They are probably my favorite literary form, along with biographies. The more confessional, the better. There is so, so, so little truth in the popular culture, and I am starved and grateful for any I can find.
Anne Lamott
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The problem with God - or at any rate, one of the top five most annoying things about God - is that he or she rarely answers right away.
Anne Lamott
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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
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I have a very dark sense of humor. I swear. I have a very playful relationship with Jesus.
Anne Lamott
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How do you begin? The answer is simple: you decide to.
Anne Lamott
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Slowly, after dozens of rejection slips and failures and false starts and postponed dreams - what Langston Hughes called dreams deferred - I stepped onto the hallowed ground of being a published novelist, and then 15 years later, I even started to make real money.
Anne Lamott
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Everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, and scared, even the people who seem to have it more or less together.
Anne Lamott
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Sometimes this human stuff is slimy and pathetic...but better to feel it and talk about it and walk through it than to spend a lifetime being silently poisoned.
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.
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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Quiet, deep breath after any prayer is another form of Amen.
Anne Lamott