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I've seen prayers answered. But often, in my experiences, if you get what you pray for, you've really shortchanged yourself.

Anne Lamott

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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Prayers
Pray
Experiences
Praying
Seen
Prayer
Often
Really
Answered

More quotes by Anne Lamott

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My best teachers were mess, failure, death, mistakes, and the people I hated, including myself.
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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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We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason why they write so little.
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I understood that the man I was calling for could never ever come back. Because I understood that the man that I was calling for was dead.
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Trying to reason with an addict was like trying to blow out a lightbulb.
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Do you mind even a little that you are still addicted to people-pleasing, and are still putting everyone else’s needs and laundry and career ahead of your creative, spiritual life? Giving all your life force away, to “help” and impress. Well, your help is not helpful, and falls short.
Anne Lamott
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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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Shirley Jackson said that a confused reader is an antagonistic reader, and I live by that. It's okay to start anywhere, and to let yourself write a big sloppy overly-detailed first draft. You just jump in, knowing that the water will be cold at first, but no one is making you swim.
Anne Lamott
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The earth is rocky and full of roots it's clay, and it seems doomed and polluted, but you dig little holes for the ugly shriveled bulbs, throw in a handful of poppy seeds, and cover it all over, and you know you'll never see it again - it's death and clay and shrivel, and your hands are nicked from the rocks, your nails black with soil.
Anne Lamott
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Perfection is shallow, unreal, and fatally uninteresting.
Anne Lamott
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I don't think anything is the opposite of love.
Anne Lamott
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Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns.
Anne Lamott
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I get to tell my truth. I get to seek meaning and realization. I get to live fully, wildly, imperfectly. That's why I'm alive. And all I actually have to offer as a writer is my version of life. Every single thing that has happened to me is mine.
Anne Lamott
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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.
Anne Lamott
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My writer friends, and they are legion, do not go around beaming with quiet feelings of contentment. Most of them go around with haunted, abused, surprised looks on their faces, like lab dogs on whom very personal deodorant sprays have been tested.
Anne Lamott
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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.
Anne Lamott
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We were raised to believe in books, music, and nature.
Anne Lamott
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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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Forgiveness means it finally becomes unimportant that you hit back.
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I get thirsty people glasses of water, even if that thirsty person is just me.
Anne Lamott