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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
Simple
Dolls
Character
Pretend
Writing
Table
Tables
Characters
Listen
Stay
Open

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Laughter is a bubbly, effervescent form of holiness
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I spent my whole life helping my mother carry around her psychic trunks like a bitter bellhop. So a great load was lifted when she died, and my life was much easier.
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Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises.
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Don't look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.
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I've always understood that meditation had to be part of - or was part of the natural path and so I've always sort of dabbled in it.
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I don't think anything is the opposite of love.
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My mother's eyes were large and brown, like my son's, but unlike Sam's, they were always frantic, like a hummingbird who can't quite find the flower but keeps jabbing around.
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These days cry out, as never before, for us to pay attention, so we can move through them and get our joy and pride back.
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To be a good writer, you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care. You do not have to have a complicated moral philosophy. But a writer always tries, I think, to be a part of a solution, to understand a little about life and to pass this on.
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My mother was a not-too-devoted atheist. She went to Episcopal church on Christmas Eve every year, and that was mostly it.
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You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the rational mind.
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No matter what circumstances, it's hard to be a parent and maintain a sense of self and identity in the world.
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A hundred years from now? All new people.
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I am the woman I grew to be partly in spite of my mother, and partly because of the extraordinary love of her best friends, and my own best friends' mothers, and from surrogates, many of whom were not women at all but gay men. I have loved them my entire life, even after their passing.
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I like the desert for short periods of time, from inside a car, with the windows rolled up, and the doors locked. I prefer beach resorts with room service.
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My deepest belief is that to live as if we're dying can set us free. Dying people teach you to pay attention and to forgive and not to sweat the small things.
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I think Jesus is divine love manifest on Earth, as it comes through the community of Christians.
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You are going to love some of your characters because they are you or some facet of you, and you are going to hate some of your characters for the same reason.
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Toni Morrison said, The function of freedom is to free someone else, and if you are no longer wracked or in bondage to a person or a way of life, tell your story. Risk freeing someone else. Not everyone will be glad that you did. Members of your family and other critics may wish you had kept your secrets. Oh, well, what are you going to do?
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Greasy food is so comforting when you are hungover.
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