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Rule 1: When all else fails, follow instructions. And Rule 2: Don't be an asshole.

Anne Lamott

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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Rule
Follow
Failing
Else
Instructions
Asshole
Fails
Instruction

More quotes by Anne Lamott

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My mother's eyes were large and brown, like my son's, but unlike Sam's, they were always frantic, like a hummingbird who can't quite find the flower but keeps jabbing around.
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You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.
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Creative expression, whether that means writing, dancing, bird-watching, or cooking, can give a person almost everything that he or she has been searching for: enlivenment, peace, meaning, and the incalculable wealth of time spent quietly in beauty.
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All freedom comes from discipline.
Anne Lamott
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Prayer means that, in some unique way, we believe we're invited into a relationship with someone who hears us when we speak in silence.
Anne Lamott
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Write as if your parents are dead.
Anne Lamott
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I was raised with no religious training or influence. Except the influence was to be a moral and ethical person at the secular level. And to be a peace marcher, an activist for civil rights, peace and justice.
Anne Lamott
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I went to church with my grandparents sometimes and I loved it.
Anne Lamott
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There is ecstasy in paying attention.
Anne Lamott
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Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.
Anne Lamott
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When hope is not pinned wriggling onto a shiny image or expectation, it sometimes floats forth and opens like one of those fluted Japanese blossoms, flimsy and spastic, bright and warm. This almost always seems to happen in community.
Anne Lamott
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There are these people who keep taking you in and feeding you and loving you and making the world a tiny bit safer than it feels. People have community and family, but existentially we are deeply isolated.
Anne Lamott
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There is nothing more touching to me then a family picture where everyone is trying to look his or her best, but you can see what a mess they all really are.
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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The first holy truth in God 101 is that men and women of true faith have always had to accept the mystery of God's identity and love and ways. I hate that, but it's the truth.
Anne Lamott
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If you have a body, you are entitled to the full range of feelings. It comes with the package.
Anne Lamott
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Joy is the best makeup. But a little lipstick is a close runner-up.
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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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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I got one of the five golden tickets to be a writer, and I take that seriously. I don't love my own work at all, but I love my own self. I love that I've been given the chance to capture the stories that come through me.
Anne Lamott