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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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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Looks
Breaths
Good
Held
Gift
Failure
Needing
Break
Figured
Feeling
Breaks
Feelings
Tension
Look
Breath

More quotes by Anne Lamott

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Certainty is missing the point entirely.
Anne Lamott
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Mostly what happens in the novels never happened in real life.
Anne Lamott
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And you try to quiet your mind so you can hear.
Anne Lamott
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I write because writing is the gift God has given me to help people in the world.
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It's almost like learning to meditate to learn to hear what your kid is actually saying.
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I got a lot of things that society had promised would make me whole and fulfilled - all the things that the culture tells you from preschool on will quiet the throbbing anxiety inside you - stature, the respect of colleagues, maybe even a kind of low-grade fame.
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And that almost everyone was struggling to wake up, to be loved, and not feel so afraid all the time. That's what the cars, degrees, booze, and drugs were about.
Anne Lamott
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I am skittish about relationships, as most of the marriages I've seen up close have been ruinous for one or both parties.
Anne Lamott
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No matter what circumstances, it's hard to be a parent and maintain a sense of self and identity in the world.
Anne Lamott
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Over and over I feel as if my characters know who they are, and what happens to them, and where they have been and where they will go, and what they are capable of doing, but they need me to write it down for them because their handwriting is so bad.
Anne Lamott
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Human lives are hard, even those of health and privilege, and don't make much sense. This is the message of the Book of Job: Any snappy explanation of suffering you come up with will be horseshit.
Anne Lamott
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It is hard to remember that you are a cherished spiritual being when you're burping up apple fritters and Cheetos.
Anne Lamott
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You are desperate to communicate, to edify or entertain, to preserve moments of grace or joy or transcendence, to make real or imagined events come alive. But you cannot will this to happen. It is a matter of persistence and faith and hard work. So you might as well just go ahead and get started.
Anne Lamott
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If you fixate on the big picture, the whole shebang, the overview, you miss the stitching.
Anne Lamott
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You have to make mistakes to find out who you aren’t.
Anne Lamott
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Needless to say, there was no one around remotely fitting the description of a normal person: I was at a writing conference.
Anne Lamott
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The evidence is in, and you are the verdict.
Anne Lamott
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I was raised by my parents to believe that you had a moral obligation to try and help save the world.
Anne Lamott
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I see that children fill the existential hollowness many people feel that when we have children, we know they will need us, and maybe love us, but we don't have a clue how hard it is going to be.
Anne Lamott
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Creative expression, whether that means writing, dancing, bird-watching, or cooking, can give a person almost everything that he or she has been searching for: enlivenment, peace, meaning, and the incalculable wealth of time spent quietly in beauty.
Anne Lamott