Quote

Grief, as I read somewhere once, is a lazy Susan. One day it is heavy and underwater, and the next day it spins and stops at loud and rageful, and the next day at wounded keening, and the next day numbness, silence.

Anne Lamott

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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Next
Wounded
Lazy
Loud
Somewhere
Spins
Heavy
Susan
Grief
Numbness
Silence
Underwater
Read
Stops

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Frequently, as so many poets and psalmists and songwriters have said, the invisible shift happens through the broken places.
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At our most primitive we are storytellers and dancers.
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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.
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He told me about his monster. His sounded just like mine without quite so much mascara. When people shine a little light on their monster, we find out how similar most of our monsters are.
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I love memoirs. They are probably my favorite literary form, along with biographies. The more confessional, the better. There is so, so, so little truth in the popular culture, and I am starved and grateful for any I can find.
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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.
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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.
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You have to make mistakes to find out who you aren’t.
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I did not raise my son, Sam, to celebrate Mother's Day. I didn't want him to feel some obligation to buy me pricey lunches or flowers, some annual display of gratitude that you have to grit your teeth and endure.
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There is nothing as sweet as a comeback, when you are down and out, about to lose, and out of time.
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Forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a better past.
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one thing about having a baby is that each step of the way you simply cannot imagine loving him any more than you already do, because you are bursting with love, loving as much as you are humanly capable of- and then you do, you love him even more.
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Listen to your broccoli and it will tell you how to eat it.
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No one is more sentimentalized in America than mothers on Mother's Day, but no one is more often blamed for the culture's bad people and behavior.
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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.
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Publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is.
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There is something so tender about this to me, about being willing to have your makeup wash off, your eyes tear up, your nose start to run. Its tender partly because it harkens back to infancy, to your mother washing your face with love and lots or water, tending to you, making you clean all over again.
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Toddlers can make you feel as if you have violated some archaic law in their personal Koran and you should die, infidel.
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And she is going to dance, dance hungry, dance full, dance each cold astonishing moment, now when she is young and again when she is old.
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Teenagers who do not go to church are adored by God, but they don't get to meet some of the people who love God back.
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