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Just don't pretend you know more about your characters than they do, because you don't. Stay open to them. It's teatime and all the dolls are at the table. Listen. It's that simple.
Anne Lamott
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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Character
Pretend
Writing
Table
Tables
Characters
Listen
Stay
Open
Simple
Dolls
More quotes by Anne Lamott
Mothers are supposed to listen and, afterward, to respond with some wisdom and perspective, but these things were not my mother's strong suit.
Anne Lamott
When God is going to do something wonderful, He or She always starts with a hardship when God is going to do something amazing, He or She starts with an impossibility.
Anne Lamott
All I know is that after 10 years of being sober, with huge support to express my pain and anger and shadow, the grief and tears didn’t wash me away. They gave me my life back! They cleansed me, baptized me, hydrated the earth at my feet. They brought me home, to me, to the truth of me.
Anne Lamott
I think joy and sweetness and affection are a spiritual path. We're here to know God, to love and serve God, and to be blown away by the beauty and miracle of nature. You just have to get rid of so much baggage to be light enough to dance, to sing, to play. You don't have time to carry grudges you don't have time to cling to the need to be right.
Anne Lamott
I didn't write about my mother much in the third year after she died. I was still trying to get my argument straight: When her friends or our relatives wondered why I was still so hard on her, I could really lay out the case for what it had been like to be raised by someone who had loathed herself, her husband, even her own name.
Anne Lamott
Your experiences will be yours alone. But truth and best friendship will rarely if ever disappoint you.
Anne Lamott
Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don't worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable worry about being absent or fraudulent.
Anne Lamott
butterflies were wind energy made visible.
Anne Lamott
Bananas are great, as I believe them to be the only known cure for existential dread. Also, Mother Teresa said that in India, a woman dying in the street will share her banana with anyone who needs it, whereas in America, people amass and hoard as many bananas as they can to sell for an exorbitant profit. So half of them go bad, anyway.
Anne Lamott
If the present is really all we have, then the present lasts forever.
Anne Lamott
No one tells you that your life is effectively over when you have a child: that you're never going to draw another complacent breath again... or that whatever level of hypochondria and rage you'd learned to repress and live with is going to seem like the good old days.
Anne Lamott
Having a baby is like suddenly getting the world's worst roommate.
Anne Lamott
I'm one of those religious people who are afraid of everything. I'm instantly worried about everything that could go wrong.
Anne Lamott
For twenty years I have ached to go back home, when there was nobody there to whom I could return.
Anne Lamott
For me, Jesus is my cleft in the rock. He is my safest friend, my safe totally loving accepting big brother.
Anne Lamott
Love is so much bigger than our ignorance.
Anne Lamott
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.
Anne Lamott
Expectations are resentments under construction.
Anne Lamott
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
You should not bring more items and hurdles to the obstacle course.
Anne Lamott
