Quote

When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again.

Anne Lamott

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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Make
Writers
Shake
Life
Laugh
Shakes
Along
Prose
Squashed
Laughing
Truths
Buoyancy
Instead
Heads
Exactness
Least
Shot
Clapping
Given
Shots
Restored
Even
Dancing
Absurdity

More quotes by Anne Lamott

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I've given guys blow jobs just because I've run out of things to talk about.' Oh, Rae. Who hasn't
Anne Lamott
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I got a lot of things that society had promised would make me whole and fulfilled - all the things that the culture tells you from preschool on will quiet the throbbing anxiety inside you - stature, the respect of colleagues, maybe even a kind of low-grade fame.
Anne Lamott
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Sometimes, no matter how screwed up things seem, I feel like we're all at a wedding. But you can't just come out and say, We're at a wedding! Have some cake! You need to create a world into which we can enter, a world where we can see this.
Anne Lamott
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Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns.
Anne Lamott
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Gratitude, not understanding, is the secret to joy and equanimity.
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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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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...the three things I cannot change are the past, the truth, and you.
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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I like to read away as much of the afternoon as possible, until real life rears its ugly head.
Anne Lamott
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Anything you say from your heart to God is a prayer.
Anne Lamott
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I sat down in the sand, breathless with shame and failure. God, I thought, some defender of the weak. Some freedom fighter: Joan of Arc in sunscreen.
Anne Lamott
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If you don't die of thirst, there are blessings in the desert. You can be pulled into limitlessness, which we all yearn for, or you can do the beauty of minutiae, the scrimshaw of tiny and precise. The sky is your ocean, and the crystal silence will uplift you like great gospel music, or Neil Young.
Anne Lamott
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This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won't wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be.
Anne Lamott
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I've known for years that resentments don't hurt the person we resent, but they do hurt us.
Anne Lamott
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One thing I know for sure about raising children is that every single day a kid needs discipline.... But also every single day a kid needs a break.
Anne Lamott
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My deepest belief is that to live as if we're dying can set us free. Dying people teach you to pay attention and to forgive and not to sweat the small things.
Anne Lamott
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I'd like to learn to meditate with more enthusiasm. I can sit down and get quiet for 20 minutes, but it just has not been a part of my Christianity at all.
Anne Lamott
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The beauty of modesty ... a virtue the world doesn't have much truck with: one ordinary flower in a vase, as opposed to a bouquet.
Anne Lamott
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You are desperate to communicate, to edify or entertain, to preserve moments of grace or joy or transcendence, to make real or imagined events come alive. But you cannot will this to happen. It is a matter of persistence and faith and hard work. So you might as well just go ahead and get started.
Anne Lamott