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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
Much
Clean
Life
Lived
Leave
Show
Means
Perfectionism
Shows
Clutter
Mean
Cleaning
Trying
Mess

More quotes by Anne Lamott

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The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little. But we do. We have so much we want to say and figure out.
Anne Lamott
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Radical self-care is what we've been longing for, desperate for, our entire lives-friendship with our own hearts.
Anne Lamott
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Life does not seem to present itself to me for my convenience, to box itself up nicely so I can write about it with wisdom and a point to make before putting it on a shelf somewhere.
Anne Lamott
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Living on Earth has always been a dangerous way to spend your time.
Anne Lamott
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...after a few days at the desk, telling the truth in an interesting way turns out to be as easy and pleasurable as bathing a cat.
Anne Lamott
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I wish I had thrown out the bathroom scale at age 16. Weighing yourself every morning is like waking up and asking Dick Cheney to validate your sense of inner worth.
Anne Lamott
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Alice Adams wrote a sweet note to me after my first novel came out when I was 26, and I was so blown away that I sent her a bunch of stamps by return mail. I have no idea what I was thinking. It was a star-struck impulse.
Anne Lamott
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I don't see myself as a deep philosopher. The things I write about tend to be what we all have to face, or consider, or experience, that I talk about with my friends and brothers. It's universal stuff, told in my own voice, my own details and truth, which is all I have to offer.
Anne Lamott
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Can you imagine the hopelessness of trying to live a spiritual life when you’re secretly looking up at the skies not for illumination or direction, but to gauge, miserably, the odds of rain?
Anne Lamott
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Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up.
Anne Lamott
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Learning to love back is the hardest part of being alive.
Anne Lamott
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Pay attention to the beauty surrounding you.
Anne Lamott
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Writing is how I communicate my deepest beliefs, and what I hope are helpful observations about our dual citizenship, as children of God, as regular old mixed-up, worried, flawed, precious human beings.
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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Your experiences will be yours alone. But truth and best friendship will rarely if ever disappoint you.
Anne Lamott
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No matter what circumstances, it's hard to be a parent and maintain a sense of self and identity in the world.
Anne Lamott
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My main problem is that over and over again, I try to get all my characters to say stuff that I think is so witty or erudite you know, so that everybody will go.
Anne Lamott
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You want to protect your child from pain, and what you get instead is life, and grace and though theologians insist that grace is freely given, the truth is that sometimes you pay for it through the nose. And you can't pay your child's way.
Anne Lamott
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I'm human, you're human, let me greet your humanness. Let's be people together for a while.
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