Quote

The real payoff is the writing itself, that a day when you have gotten your work done is a good day, that total dedication is the point.

Anne Lamott

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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Work
Payoff
Good
Dedication
Gotten
Total
Point
Done
Real
Writing

More quotes by Anne Lamott

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Your unconscious can't work when you are breathing down its neck.
Anne Lamott
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A priest friend of mine has cautioned me away from the standard God of our childhoods, who loves you and guides you and then, if you are bad, roasts you: God as a high school principal in a gray suit who never remembered your name but is always leafing unhappily through your files.
Anne Lamott
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I never had a particularly strong craving to procreate, except for earlier fantasies of wanting to be Marmee in Little Women.
Anne Lamott
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Most marriages are a mess, and the children get caught between two bitter, antagonistic parents. My parents stayed married for 27 unhappy years, till their kids were grown, and this was a catastrophe for us.
Anne Lamott
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Looking back on the God my friend believed in, he seems a little erratic, not entirely unlike her father - God as borderline personality.
Anne Lamott
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I am an Aries. Although I do not believe in astrology, I think this is exactly the right sign to have been born under.
Anne Lamott
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Your problem is how you are going to spend this one odd and precious life you have been issued. Whether you're going to spend it trying to look good and creating the illusion that you have power over people and circumstances, or whether you are going to taste it, enjoy it and find out the truth about who you are.
Anne Lamott
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Then the singing enveloped me. It was furry and resonant, coming from everyone's very heart. There was no sense of performance or judgment, only that the music was breath and food.
Anne Lamott
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Sometimes it feels like God has reached down and touched me, blessed me a thousand times over, and sometimes it all feels like a mean joke, like God's advisers are Muammar Qaddafi and Phyllis Schlafly.
Anne Lamott
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You fall so deeply in love with your grandbaby. It's so so so much easier than being a parent, because you really don't have much responsibility. And just when you are at the end of your rope with exhaustion, the parents take the baby away. So it's the best of both worlds.
Anne Lamott
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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.
Anne Lamott
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Again and again I tell God I need help, and God says, 'Well, isn't that fabulous? Because I need help too. So you go get that old woman over there some water, and I'll figure out what we're going to do about your stuff.
Anne Lamott
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...because when people have seen you at their worst, you don't have to put on the mask as much.
Anne Lamott
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Reading poetry and reading the great works of the canon that we were reading in the '60s and the '70s and '80s was mind altering.
Anne Lamott
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Grief is just so scary.... If we finally begin to cry all those suppressed tears, they will surely wash us away like the Mississippi River. That's what our parents told us. We got sent to our rooms for having huge feelings. In my family, if you cried or got angry, you didn't get dinner.
Anne Lamott
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My idea of everything going smoothly on an airplane is (a) that I not die in a slow-motion fiery crash or get stabbed to death by terrorists and (b) that none of the other passengers try to talk to me. All conversation should end at the moment the wheels leave the ground.
Anne Lamott
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You just have to keep getting out of your own way so that whatever it is that wants to be written can use you to write it.
Anne Lamott
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For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.
Anne Lamott
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Trying to reason with an addict was like trying to blow out a lightbulb.
Anne Lamott
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Prayer means that, in some unique way, we believe we're invited into a relationship with someone who hears us when we speak in silence.
Anne Lamott