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
Heavy
Susan
Grief
Numbness
Silence
Underwater
Read
Stops
Next
Wounded
Lazy
Loud
Somewhere
Spins

More quotes by Anne Lamott

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I don't have any romantic views of parenting. Every step of the way it's really hard. It's a dangerous world, physically and psychologically.
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Anything you say from your heart to God is a prayer. But why is rarely a useful question. When Job keeps asking God why he has had such loss and suffering, God says, You wouldn't understand. I always want to know why, and I almost never have a good answer.
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I accidentally forgot to graduate from college.
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You can tell if people are following Jesus, because they are fedding the poor, sharing their wealth, and trying to get everyone medical insurance.
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When faced with a crisis, do three things: breathe, pray and be kind.
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I go to church every Sunday, which is like going to the gas station once a week and really, really filling up.
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I think we're all pretty crazy on this bus. I'm not sure I know anyone who's got all the dots on his or her dice.
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You can either practice being right or practice being kind.
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My understanding is that you get to choose which of your thoughts to go with.
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If you are a writer, or want to be a writer, this is how you spend your days--listening, observing, storing things away, making your isolation pay off. You take home all you've taken in, all that you've overheard, and you turn it into gold. (Or at least you try.)
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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.
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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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I'm drawn to almost any piece of writing with the words 'divine love' and 'impeachment' in the first sentence. But I know the word 'divine' makes many progressive people run screaming for their cute little lives, and so one hesitates to use it.
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Slowly, after dozens of rejection slips and failures and false starts and postponed dreams - what Langston Hughes called dreams deferred - I stepped onto the hallowed ground of being a published novelist, and then 15 years later, I even started to make real money.
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Most people's intuitions are drowned out by folk sayings. We have a moment of real feeling or insight, and then we come up with a folk saying that captures the insight in a kind of wash. The intuition may be real and ripe, fresh with possibilities, but the folk saying is guaranteed to be a cliche, stale and self-contained.
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Rituals are a good signal to your unconscious that it is time to kick in.
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For too long, and despite what people told me, I had fallen for what the culture said about beauty, youth, features, heights, weights, hair textures, upper arms.
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There is ecstasy in paying attention. You can get into a kind of Wordsworthian openness to the world, where you see in everything the essence of holiness.
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Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor, because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong. It is no wonder if we sometimes tend to take ourselves perhaps a bit too seriously.
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Get to know your characters as well as you can let there be something at stake, and then let the chips fall where they may.
Anne Lamott