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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I can never tell what I'm doing when I'm in the middle of publication because I have no confidence. I have terrible self-esteem, along with boundless narcissism.
Anne Lamott
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Bananas are great, as I believe them to be the only known cure for existential dread. Also, Mother Teresa said that in India, a woman dying in the street will share her banana with anyone who needs it, whereas in America, people amass and hoard as many bananas as they can to sell for an exorbitant profit. So half of them go bad, anyway.
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You don't always have to chop with the sword of truth. You can point with it too.
Anne Lamott
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I do believe that God is with us even when we're at our craziest and that this goodness guides, provides, and protects.
Anne Lamott
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I feel incredibly successful. I make a living as a writer and am able to help support a big family, my church, my bleeding-heart causes.
Anne Lamott
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If you don't die of thirst, there are blessings in the desert. You can be pulled into limitlessness, which we all yearn for, or you can do the beauty of minutiae, the scrimshaw of tiny and precise. The sky is your ocean, and the crystal silence will uplift you like great gospel music, or Neil Young.
Anne Lamott
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And you try to quiet your mind so you can hear.
Anne Lamott
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You just have to keep getting out of your own way so that whatever it is that wants to be written can use you to write it.
Anne Lamott
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Most people's intuitions are drowned out by folk sayings. We have a moment of real feeling or insight, and then we come up with a folk saying that captures the insight in a kind of wash. The intuition may be real and ripe, fresh with possibilities, but the folk saying is guaranteed to be a cliche, stale and self-contained.
Anne Lamott
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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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You have to make mistakes to find out who you aren’t.
Anne Lamott
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Forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a better past.
Anne Lamott
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Mine was a patchwork God, sewn together from bits of rag and ribbon, Eastern and Western, pagan and Hebrew, everything but the kitchen sink and Jesus.
Anne Lamott
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Sometimes Heaven is just a new pair of glasses.
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.
Anne Lamott
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Lies cannot nourish or protect you. Only freedom from fear, freedom from lies, can make us beautiful, and keep us safe.
Anne Lamott
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Sometimes it takes failure to figure out who you aren't.
Anne Lamott
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To be great, art has to point somewhere.
Anne Lamott
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I believe that discipline and self-love are the total secrets to freedom.
Anne Lamott
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My coming to faith did not start with a leap but rather a series of staggers from what seemed like one safe place to another. Like lily pads, round and green, these places summoned and then held me up while I grew. Each prepared me for the next leaf on which I would land, and in this way I moved across the swamp of doubt and fear.
Anne Lamott