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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

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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Save
Inside
Gnostic
Bring
Uncle
Jesus
Thomas
Believe
Uncles
Gospel
Forth
Destroy

More quotes by Anne Lamott

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You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the rational mind. The rational mind doesn't nourish you. You assume that it gives you the truth, because the rational mind is the golden calf that this culture worships, but this is not true. Rationality squeezes out much that is rich and juicy and fascinating.
Anne Lamott
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The real payoff is the writing itself, that a day when you have gotten your work done is a good day, that total dedication is the point.
Anne Lamott
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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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For too long, and despite what people told me, I had fallen for what the culture said about beauty, youth, features, heights, weights, hair textures, upper arms.
Anne Lamott
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These days cry out, as never before, for us to pay attention, so we can move through them and get our joy and pride back.
Anne Lamott
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And you try to quiet your mind so you can hear.
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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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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In fact, not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die.
Anne Lamott
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You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories.
Anne Lamott
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No is a complete sentence.
Anne Lamott
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All I ever wanted since I arrived here on earth are the same things I needed as a baby, to go from cold to warm, lonely to held, the vessel to the giver, empty to full.
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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Most of me was glad when my mother died. She was a handful, but not in a cute, festive way. More in a life-threatening way, that had caused me a long time ago to give up all hope of ever feeling good about having had her as a mother.
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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All I know is that after 10 years of being sober, with huge support to express my pain and anger and shadow, the grief and tears didn’t wash me away. They gave me my life back! They cleansed me, baptized me, hydrated the earth at my feet. They brought me home, to me, to the truth of me.
Anne Lamott
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My coming to faith did not start with a leap but rather a series of staggers from what seemed like one safe place to another. Like lily pads, round and green, these places summoned and then held me up while I grew. Each prepared me for the next leaf on which I would land, and in this way I moved across the swamp of doubt and fear.
Anne Lamott
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My mother might find a thin gold chain at the back of a drawer, wadded into an impossibly tight knot, and give it to me to untangle. It would have a shiny, sweaty smell, and excite me: Gold chains linked you to the great fairy tales and myths, to Arabia, and India to the great weight of the world, but lighter than a feather.
Anne Lamott
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If you want to make God laugh, tell her your plans.
Anne Lamott
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The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. 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 they write so very little. But we do. We have so much we want to say and figure out.
Anne Lamott