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
Good
Brain
Always
Everyone
Jockey
Life
Use
Crazier
People
Around
Jockeys
Thought
Infinitely
Heart
Including
Trying
Especially
Make
Already

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I used to tell my writing students that they must write the books they wished they could come upon - because then the books they hungered and thirsted for would exist.
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I used to love to untangle chains when I was a child. I had thin, busy fingers, and I never gave up. Perhaps there was a psychiatric component to my concentration but like much of my psychic damage, this worked to everyone's advantage.
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I've known for years that resentments don't hurt the person we resent, but they do hurt us.
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To love yourself as you are is a miracle, and to seek yourself is to have found yourself for now. And now is all we have, and love is who we are.
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Seeing yourself in print is such an amazing concept: you can get so much attention without having to actually show up somewhere... You don't have to dress up, for instance, and you can't hear them boo you right away.
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by then I'd figured out the gift of failure, which is that it breaks through all that held breath and isometric tension about needing to look good: it's the gift of feeling floppier.
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When everything starts going wrong all at once, it is to protect something big and lovely that is trying to get itself born.
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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.
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Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life Besides, perfectionism will ruin your writing, blocking inventiveness and playfulness and life force (these are words we are allowed to use in California).
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Jealousy has always been my cross, the weakness and woundedness in me that has most often caused me to feel ugly and unlovable, like the Bad Seed.
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No one can appropriate God, goodness, the Bible or Jesus. It just seems that way.
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Good writing is about telling the truth.
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Mothering has been the richest experience of my life, but I am still opposed to Mother's Day. It perpetuates the dangerous idea that all parents are somehow superior to non-parents.
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I kept asking God for help, and after a while I realized something -- that Josh was not enjoying this either. He was just trying to take care of himself, and I made the radical decision to let him off the hook.
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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.
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A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way.
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For twenty years I have ached to go back home, when there was nobody there to whom I could return.
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There are a lot of us, some published, some not, who think the literary life is the loveliest one possible, this life of reading and writing and corresponding. We think this life is nearly ideal.
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Feeding a baby is like filling a hole with putty - you get it in and then you sort of shave off all the excess around the hole and get it back in, like you're spackling.
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How do you begin? The answer is simple: you decide to.
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