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I think that is why we stay close to our families, no matter how neurotic the members, how deeply annoying or dull- because when people have seen you at your worst, you don’t have to put on the mask as much.

Anne Lamott

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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
People
Close
Stay
Neurotic
Worst
Annoying
Seen
Mask
Matter
Dull
Much
Families
Think
Deeply
Thinking
Members

More quotes by Anne Lamott

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Mothering has been the richest experience of my life, but I am still opposed to Mother's Day. It perpetuates the dangerous idea that all parents are somehow superior to non-parents.
Anne Lamott
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All these people keep waxing sentimental about how fabulously well I am doing as a mother, how competent I am, but I feel inside like when you're first learning to put nail polish on your right hand with your left. You can do it, but it doesn't look all that great around the cuticles.
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...since you can't heal your own sick mind with your own sick mind, I needed to consult somebody else's sick mind.
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I don't know much, but I understand how entirely doomed I am without God.
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I've heard people say that God is the gift of desperation, and there's a lot to be said for having really reached a bottom where you've run out of any more good ideas or plans for everybody else's behavior or how to save and fix and rescue or just get out of a huge mess, possibly of your own creation.
Anne Lamott
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I never had a particularly strong craving to procreate, except for earlier fantasies of wanting to be Marmee in Little Women.
Anne Lamott
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Clutter and mess show us that life is being lived.
Anne Lamott
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I've always thought I could use my brain and my heart to jockey everyone around to the good. But life is not jockeyable. When you try, you make people infinitely crazier than they already were, including or especially yourself.
Anne Lamott
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My understanding is that you get to choose which of your thoughts to go with.
Anne Lamott
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All freedom comes from discipline.
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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It's funny where we look for salvation, and where we actually find it.
Anne Lamott
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It feels like I'm babysitting in the Twilight Zone. I keep waiting for the parents to show up because we are out of chips and diet cokes.
Anne Lamott
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I quit my last real job, as a writer at a magazine, when I was twenty-one. That was the moment when I lost my place of prestige on the fast track, and slowly, millimeter by millimeter, I started to get found, to discover who I had been born to be, instead of the impossibly small package, all tied up tightly in myself, that I had agreed to be.
Anne Lamott
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Her purse was a weight, ballast it tethered her to the earth as her mind floated away.
Anne Lamott
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It is a violation of trust to use your kids as caulking for the cracks in you.
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 get thirsty people glasses of water, even if that thirsty person is just me.
Anne Lamott
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A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way. It's a lie if you make something up. But you make it up in the name of truth, and then you give your heart to expressing it clearly.
Anne Lamott
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When hope is not pinned wriggling onto a shiny image or expectation, it sometimes floats forth and opens.
Anne Lamott