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

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I honestly think that in order to be a writer you have to learn to be reverent. If not, why are you writing? Why are you here?
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There is nothing you can buy, achieve, own, or rent that can fill up that hunger inside for a sense of fulfillment and wonder.
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It was not facing what life dealt that made you crazy, but rather trying to set life straight where it was unstraightenable.
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It turned out this man worked for the Dalai Lama. And she said gently-that they believe when a lot of things start going wrong all at once, it is to protect something big and lovely that is trying to get itself born-and that this something needs for you to be distracted so that it can be born as perfectly as possible.
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I was raised by my parents to believe that you had a moral obligation to try and help save the world.
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You have to make mistakes to find out who you aren't. You take the action, and the insight follows: You don't think your way into becoming yourself.
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If you are writing the clearest, truest words you can find and doing the best you can to understand and communicate, this will shine on paper like its own little lighthouse. Lighthouses dont go running all over an island looking for boats to save they just stand there shining.
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Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something—anything—down on paper. What I’ve learned to do when I sit down to work on a shitty first draft is to quiet the voices in my head.
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Life is really pretty tricky, and there's a lot of loss, and the longer you stay alive, the more people you lose whom you actually couldn't live without.
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And that almost everyone was struggling to wake up, to be loved, and not feel so afraid all the time. That's what the cars, degrees, booze, and drugs were about.
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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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Over and over I feel as if my characters know who they are, and what happens to them, and where they have been and where they will go, and what they are capable of doing, but they need me to write it down for them because their handwriting is so bad.
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But it was the singing that pulled me in and split me wide open.
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There is ecstasy in paying attention.
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You can change the world with a hot bath, if you sink into it from a place of knowing that you are worth profound care, even when you're dirty and rattled.
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In fact, not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die.
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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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You must not inflict life on someone who will be resented.
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Sometimes grace is a ribbon of mountain air that gets in through the cracks.
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Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul.
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