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You can get the monkey off your back, but the circus never leaves town

Anne Lamott

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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Towns
Back
Never
Monkey
Circus
Monkeys
Recovery
Town
Leaves

More quotes by 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.
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...because when people have seen you at their worst, you don't have to put on the mask as much.
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Writing takes a combination of sophistication and innocence it takes conscience, our belief that something is beautiful because it is right.
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[Her] work taught me that you could be all the traditional feminine things -- a mother, a lover, a listener, a nurturer -- and you could also be critically astute and radical and have a minority opinion that was profoundly moral.
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When everything starts going wrong all at once, it is to protect something big and lovely that is trying to get itself born.
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I kept asking God for help, and after a while I realized something -- that Josh was not enjoying this either. He was just trying to take care of himself, and I made the radical decision to let him off the hook.
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I woke up full of hate and fear the day before the most recent peace march in San Francisco. This was disappointing: I'd hoped to wake up feeling somewhere between Virginia Woolf and Wavy Gravy.
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I have been somebody who has not written a great deal about the truth of my family's life.
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Certainty is missing the point entirely.
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This business of having been issued a body is deeply confusing... Bodies are so messy and disappointing.
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Churches are good for prayer, but so are garages and cars and mountains and showers and dance floors.
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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.
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Presents can make up for some of the disappointments that life doles out, such as it makes almost no sense and is coming to an end more quickly than ever.
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If you want to make God laugh, tell her your plans.
Anne Lamott
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The miracle is that we are here, that no matter how undone we’ve been the night before, we wake up every morning and are still here. It is phenomenal just to be.
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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In fact, there's really only one thing that everything's made of it's energy.
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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But grace can be the experience of a second wind, when even though what you want is clarity and resolution, what you get is stamina and poignancy and the strength to hang on.
Anne Lamott
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You can change the world with a hot bath, if you sink into it from a place of knowing that you are worth profound care, even when you're dirty and rattled.
Anne Lamott