Quote

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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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Thought
Infinitely
Heart
Including
Trying
Especially
Make
Already
Good
Brain
Always
Everyone
Jockey
Life
Use
Crazier
People
Around
Jockeys

More quotes by Anne Lamott

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I've written six novels and four pieces of nonfiction, so I don't really have a genre these days.
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I believe that discipline and self-love are the total secrets to freedom.
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If you're lucky you find your way into a spiritual community and you start to find the great teachers of all the ages who said the same thing. There's only love, you're made of love.
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All I know is that after 10 years of being sober, with huge support to express my pain and anger and shadow, the grief and tears didn’t wash me away. They gave me my life back! They cleansed me, baptized me, hydrated the earth at my feet. They brought me home, to me, to the truth of me.
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And my fear of failure has been lifelong and deep. If you are what you do- and I think my parents may have accidentally given me this idea- and you do poorly, what then? It’s over you’re wiped out. All those prophecies you heard in the dark have come true, and people can see the real you, see what a schmendrick you are, what a fraud.
Anne Lamott
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I am a terrible and lazy Christian. I do not believe that the Bible is the literal word of God. I just skip about a third of it. I love the parts I love so much, but I find a lot of it just appalling. When a right-wing person quotes a passage in order to attack and stigmatize another person--or group of people--I just roll my eyes.
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Lies cannot nourish or protect you. Only freedom from fear, freedom from lies, can make us beautiful, and keep us safe.
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Some people wanted to get rich or famous, but my friends and I wanted to get real. We wanted to get deep. (Also, I suppose, we wanted to get laid.)
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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.
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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My experience as a writer is that you really do write seven and eight pages to find the paragraph you were after all along.
Anne Lamott
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Love is so much bigger than our ignorance.
Anne Lamott
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The reason I never give up hope is because everything is so basically hopeless.
Anne Lamott
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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.
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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You have to keep taking the next necessary stitch, and the next one, and the next. Without stitches, you just have rags. And we are not rags.
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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Raising a child, whether or not it is yours, is like Nautilus of the heart and soul.
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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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