Quote

If you are a writer, or want to be a writer, this is how you spend your days--listening, observing, storing things away, making your isolation pay off. You take home all you've taken in, all that you've overheard, and you turn it into gold. (Or at least you try.)

Anne Lamott

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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Things
Days
Isolation
Taken
Gold
Turns
Spend
Making
Pay
Away
Listening
Home
Writer
Overheard
Take
Turn
Storing
Trying
Least
Observing

More quotes by Anne Lamott

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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.
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.
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Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers.
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Your inside person doesn’t age. Your inside person is soul, is heart, in the eternal now, the ageless, the old, the young, all the ages you’ve ever been.
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...the three things I cannot change are the past, the truth, and you.
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I have a very dark sense of humor. I swear. I have a very playful relationship with Jesus.
Anne Lamott
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Sometimes Heaven is just a new pair of glasses.
Anne Lamott
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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.
Anne Lamott
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The clipping said forgiveness meant that God is for giving, and that we are here for giving too, and that to withold love or blessings is to be completely delusional.
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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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For some of us, good books and beautiful writing are our ultimate solace, even more comforting than exquisite food.
Anne Lamott
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Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don't worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable worry about being absent or fraudulent.
Anne Lamott
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I just can't get over how much babies cry. I really had no idea what I was getting into. To tell you the truth, I thought it would be more like getting a cat.
Anne Lamott
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We can't understand when we're pregnant, or when our siblings are expecting, how profound it is to have a shared history with a younger generation: blood, genes, humor. It means we were actually here, on Earth, for a time - like the Egyptians with their pyramids, only with children.
Anne Lamott
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Just don't pretend you know more about your characters than they do, because you don't. Stay open to them. It's teatime and all the dolls are at the table. Listen. It's that simple.
Anne Lamott
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Sometimes this human stuff is slimy and pathetic...but better to feel it and talk about it and walk through it than to spend a lifetime being silently poisoned.
Anne Lamott
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What if we never 'get over' certain deaths, or our childhoods? What if the idea that we should have by now, or will, is a great palace lie? What if we're not supposed to? What if it takes a life time...?
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
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[S]he believed that the Buddhists were right–that if you want, you will suffer if you love, you will grieve. (68)
Anne Lamott
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If we can believe in the Gnostic gospel of Thomas, old Uncle Jesus said, If you bring forth what is inside you, what you bring forth will save you. If you don't bring forth what is inside you, what you bring forth can destroy you.
Anne Lamott