Quote

Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don't drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor's yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper.

Anne Lamott

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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Keep
Bringing
Wayward
Back
Drop
Yard
Trying
Newspapers
Puppy
Every
Neighbor
Yards
Mind
Patience
Newspaper
Time
Train
Kick
Paper
Kicks
Looking
Floor

More quotes by Anne Lamott

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And yet, I do believe there is ultimately meaning in the chaos, and also in the doldrums. What I resist is not the truth but when people put a pretty bow on scary things instead of saying, 'This is a nightmare. I hate everything. I’m going to go hide in the garage.'
Anne Lamott
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Publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is.
Anne Lamott
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Jealousy is such a direct attack on whatever measure of confidence you’ve been able to muster. But if you continue to write, you are probably going to have to deal with it, because some wonderful, dazzling successes are going to happen for some of the most awful, angry, undeserving writers you know-people who are, in other words, not you.
Anne Lamott
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The solution is always spiritual, and it almost never has anything to do with the problem ... laughter is carbonated holiness.
Anne Lamott
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Mothers are supposed to listen and, afterward, to respond with some wisdom and perspective, but these things were not my mother's strong suit.
Anne Lamott
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Try to write in a directly emotional way, instead of being too subtle or oblique. Don't be afraid of your material or your past. Be afraid of wasting any more time obsessing about how you look and how people see you. Be afraid of not getting your writing done.
Anne Lamott
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Being enough was going to have to be an inside job.
Anne Lamott
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I'm kind of a gossip hound, but watching the media whip the small fires into giant forest fires so that they can cover the result is infuriating.
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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Here are the two best prayers I know: 'Help me, help me, help me' and 'Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Anne Lamott
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We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason why they write so little.
Anne Lamott
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I am a terrible and lazy Christian. I do not believe that the Bible is the literal word of God. I just skip about a third of it. I love the parts I love so much, but I find a lot of it just appalling. When a right-wing person quotes a passage in order to attack and stigmatize another person--or group of people--I just roll my eyes.
Anne Lamott
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I would seriously rather be in a long line at the DMV than eat with people I don't know.
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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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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Living on Earth has always been a dangerous way to spend your time.
Anne Lamott
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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.
Anne Lamott
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For me, being a writer is not an altered state. It's very ponderous, and very - it's like being a shoemaker.
Anne Lamott
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And as it turns out, if one person is praying for you, buckle up. Things can happen.
Anne Lamott
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Alice Adams wrote a sweet note to me after my first novel came out when I was 26, and I was so blown away that I sent her a bunch of stamps by return mail. I have no idea what I was thinking. It was a star-struck impulse.
Anne Lamott