Quote

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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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Way
Getting
Wasting
Time
Write
Directly
People
Past
Subtle
Look
Material
Looks
Materials
Done
Afraid
Writing
Emotional
Oblique
Trying
Instead
Obsessing

More quotes by Anne Lamott

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... everyone has come to understand that unconditional love is a reality, but with as shelf life of about eight to ten seconds. [p. 110]
Anne Lamott
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You have to be a warrior and say, Maybe it's everyone else's system, but it's not mine. (from her recent interview here, on Goodreads)
Anne Lamott
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I love memoirs. They are probably my favorite literary form, along with biographies. The more confessional, the better. There is so, so, so little truth in the popular culture, and I am starved and grateful for any I can find.
Anne Lamott
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I don't have very sophisticated taste in music. I listen to a lot of folk music. I like reggae.
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I get to tell my truth. I get to seek meaning and realization. I get to live fully, wildly, imperfectly. That's why I'm alive. And all I actually have to offer as a writer is my version of life. Every single thing that has happened to me is mine.
Anne Lamott
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All criticism hurts me. I'm so in the wrong business.
Anne Lamott
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Age has given me what I was looking for my entire life - it gave me me. It provided the time and experience and failures and triumphs and friends who helped me step into the shape that had been waiting for me all my life...I not only get along with me most of the time now, I am militantly and maternally on my own side.
Anne Lamott
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For twenty years I have ached to go back home, when there was nobody there to whom I could return.
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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I thought such awful thoughts that I cannot even say them out loud because they would make Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish.
Anne Lamott
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Nothing heals us like letting people know our scariest parts: When people listen to you cry and lament, and look at you with love, it's like they are holding the baby of you.
Anne Lamott
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Grief, as I read somewhere once, is a lazy Susan. One day it is heavy and underwater, and the next day it spins and stops at loud and rageful, and the next day at wounded keening, and the next day numbness, silence.
Anne Lamott
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A good marriage is where both people feel like they're getting the better end of the deal.
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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You know, we're often ashamed of asking for so much help because it seems selfish or petty or narcissistic, but I think, if there's a God -- and I believe there is -- that God is there to help. That's what God's job is.
Anne Lamott
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But you don't always get what you want,you get what you get
Anne Lamott
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Laughter is the key that grace has arrived.
Anne Lamott
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I'm not going to change the way people think about me, but I can say you know what? I'm not going to carry that in my backpack.
Anne Lamott
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We're out there somewhere between the known and the unknown, trying to reel in both for a closer look.
Anne Lamott
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But easy's like, who cares? Easy's like, how much is easy going to get you?
Anne Lamott