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Write as if your parents are dead.

Anne Lamott

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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Parents
Dead
Parent
Write
Writing

More quotes by Anne Lamott

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You are not your bank account, or your ambitiousness. You're not the cold clay lump with a big belly you leave behind when you die. You're not your collection of walking personality disorders. You are spirit, you are love.
Anne Lamott
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You have to keep taking the next necessary stitch, and the next one, and the next. Without stitches, you just have rags. And we are not rags.
Anne Lamott
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I can tell you that what you're looking for is already inside you.
Anne Lamott
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I've always understood that meditation had to be part of - or was part of the natural path and so I've always sort of dabbled in it.
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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Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.
Anne Lamott
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There is ecstasy in paying attention. You can get into a kind of Wordsworthian openness to the world, where you see in everything the essence of holiness.
Anne Lamott
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Prayer is talking to something or anything with which we seek union, even if we are bitter or insane or broken. (In fact, these are probably the best possible conditions under which to pray.) Prayer is taking a chance that against all odds and past history, we are loved and chosen, and do not have to get it together before we show up.
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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...the three things I cannot change are the past, the truth, and you.
Anne Lamott
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I spend most of my time alone, because I so value and thrive in the quiet. Heaven.
Anne Lamott
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Writing is about hypnotizing yourself into believing in yourself, getting some work done, then unhypnotizing yourself and going over the material coldly.
Anne Lamott
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If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. Otherwise, you'll just be rearranging furniture in rooms you've already been in.
Anne Lamott
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So what are we supposed to do again, when we hate everything? You stop pretending life is such fun or makes sense. It's often messy and cruel and dull, and we do the best we can. It's unfair, and jerks seem to win. But you fall in love with a few people. Like I love you, Elizabeth. You're the angel God sent me.
Anne Lamott
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Radical self-care is what we've been longing for, desperate for, our entire lives-friendship with our own hearts.
Anne Lamott
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My friend Terry says that when you need to make a decision, in your work or otherwise, and you don’t know what to do, just do one thing or the other, because the worst that can happen is that you will have made a terrible mistake.
Anne Lamott
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Sometimes grace works like water wings when you feel you are sinking.
Anne Lamott
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When you're conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader.
Anne Lamott
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I didn't write about my mother much in the third year after she died. I was still trying to get my argument straight: When her friends or our relatives wondered why I was still so hard on her, I could really lay out the case for what it had been like to be raised by someone who had loathed herself, her husband, even her own name.
Anne Lamott
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Everything takes me forever. It's all lurch, flail. I hope that is good news to you writers.
Anne Lamott