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Perfectionism means that you try not to leave so much mess to clean up. But clutter and mess show us that life is being lived.
Anne Lamott
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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Life
Lived
Leave
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Means
Perfectionism
Shows
Clutter
Mean
Cleaning
Trying
Mess
Much
Clean
More quotes by Anne Lamott
Perfection is shallow, unreal, and fatally uninteresting.
Anne Lamott
What an incredible drug fear is.
Anne Lamott
A nun I know once told me she kept begging God to take her character defects away from her. After years of this prayer, God finally got back to her: I'm not going to take anything away from you, you have to give it to Me.
Anne Lamott
... the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day. [pp. 65-66]
Anne Lamott
Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor the enemy of the people. It will keep you insane your whole life.
Anne Lamott
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
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
The whistle is always waiting to be blown, and in some ways, it gets me to do better work.
Anne Lamott
I am the woman I grew to be partly in spite of my mother, and partly because of the extraordinary love of her best friends, and my own best friends' mothers, and from surrogates, many of whom were not women at all but gay men. I have loved them my entire life, even after their passing.
Anne Lamott
I'd wanted to be a writer my whole life. But when I finally made it, I felt like a greyhound catching the mechanical rabbit she'd been chasing for so long--discovering it was merely metal, wrapped in cloth. It wasn't alive it had no spirit. It was fake.
Anne Lamott
I took notes on the people around me, in my town, in my family, in my memory. I took notes on my own state of mind, my grandiosity, the low self-esteem. I wrote down the funny stuff I overheard. I learned to be like a ship's rat, veined ears trembling, and I learned to scribble it all down.
Anne Lamott
Sometimes grace works like water wings when you feel you are sinking.
Anne Lamott
We all have the dark, ignorant shadow inside us. I have worked endlessly to reveal it and heal it in me, but of course there's some primitive weird stuff in me. The Tea Party is about exhorting white supremacy, though, so I've had a tiny bit of trouble experiencing sympathy.
Anne Lamott
I liked those ladies! They were helpers, and they danced.' These are the words I want on my gravestone: that I was a helper, and that I danced.
Anne Lamott
Gratitude begins in our hearts and then dovetails into behavior. It almost always makes you willing to be of service, which is where the joy resides.
Anne Lamott
Radical self-care is quantum, and radiates out into the atmosphere, like a little fresh air. It is a huge gift to the world. When people respond by saying, “Well, isn’t she full of herself,” smile obliquely, like Mona Lisa, and make both of you a nice cup of tea.
Anne Lamott
Life with most teenagers was like having a low-grade bladder infection. It hurts, but you had to tough it out.
Anne Lamott
Write regularly, whether you feel like writing or not, and whether you think what you're writing is any good or not.
Anne Lamott
Frequently, as so many poets and psalmists and songwriters have said, the invisible shift happens through the broken places.
Anne Lamott
Grace arrived, like the big, loopy stitches with which a grandmotherly stranger might baste your hem temporarily.
Anne Lamott
