Quote

You don't want to spend your time around people who make you hold your breath. You can't fill up when you're holding your breath. And writing is about filling up, filling up when you are empty, letting images and ideas and smells run down like water - just as writing is also about dealing with the emptiness.

Anne Lamott

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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Time
Hold
Holding
Like
Water
Fill
People
Running
Images
Around
Breath
Smells
Also
Breaths
Filling
Ideas
Smell
Emptiness
Writing
Empty
Letting
Make
Spend
Dealing

More quotes by Anne Lamott

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You keep working on your piece over and over, trying to get the sections and paragraphs and sentences and the whole just right, but there's a point at which you can tell you've begun hurting the work with your perfectionism. Then you have to release the work to new eyes.
Anne Lamott
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We all have the dark, ignorant shadow inside us. I have worked endlessly to reveal it and heal it in me, but of course there's some primitive weird stuff in me. The Tea Party is about exhorting white supremacy, though, so I've had a tiny bit of trouble experiencing sympathy.
Anne Lamott
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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.
Anne Lamott
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Writing takes a combination of sophistication and innocence it takes conscience, our belief that something is beautiful because it is right.
Anne Lamott
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Human lives are hard, even those of health and privilege, and don't make much sense. This is the message of the Book of Job: Any snappy explanation of suffering you come up with will be horseshit.
Anne Lamott
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When you pray, you are not starting the conversation from scratch, just remembering to plug back into a conversation that's always in progress.
Anne Lamott
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Forgiveness means it finally becomes unimportant that you hit back. You're done. It doesn't necessarily mean that you want to have lunch with the person. If you keep hitting back, you stay trapped in the nightmare.
Anne Lamott
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Forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a better past.
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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Novels ought to have hope at least, American novels ought to have hope. French novels don't need to. We mostly win wars, they lose them. Of course, they did hide more Jews than many other countries, and this is a form of winning.
Anne Lamott
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There is a door we all want to walk through and writing can help you find it and open it.
Anne Lamott
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This is who I want to be in the world. This is who I think we are supposed to be, people who help call forth human beings from deep inside hopelessness.
Anne Lamott
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Can you imagine the hopelessness of trying to live a spiritual life when you’re secretly looking up at the skies not for illumination or direction, but to gauge, miserably, the odds of rain?
Anne Lamott
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It is in many people's best interest for you not to find yourself, but it only matters that it is in yours, and the whole world's, to proceed.
Anne Lamott
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Because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be?
Anne Lamott
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One line of dialogue that rings true reveals character in a way that pages of description can't.
Anne Lamott
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All freedom comes from discipline.
Anne Lamott
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I wish I had thrown out the bathroom scale at age 16. Weighing yourself every morning is like waking up and asking Dick Cheney to validate your sense of inner worth.
Anne Lamott
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You are not your bank account, or your ambitiousness. You're not the cold clay lump with a big belly you leave behind when you die. You're not your collection of walking personality disorders. You are spirit, you are love.
Anne Lamott
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I went to Goucher College in Maryland for the best possible reasons - to learn - but then I dropped out at 19 for the best possible reasons - to become a writer.
Anne Lamott