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There is ecstasy in paying attention. You can get into a kind of Wordsworthian openness to the world, where you see in everything the essence of holiness.

Anne Lamott

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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Paying
Essence
Attention
Inspirational
Everything
Kind
Openness
World
Ecstasy
Holiness

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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Once an old woman at my church said the secret is that God loves us exactly the way we are and that he loves us too much to let us stay like this, and I'm just trying to trust that.
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Love is so much bigger than our ignorance.
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Forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a better past.
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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.
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I woke up full of hate and fear the day before the most recent peace march in San Francisco. This was disappointing: I'd hoped to wake up feeling somewhere between Virginia Woolf and Wavy Gravy.
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When I was a kid, our family used to watch 'Bonanza.' I really liked having a Sunday night TV ritual.
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Seeing yourself in print is such an amazing concept: you can get so much attention without having to actually show up somewhere... You don't have to dress up, for instance, and you can't hear them boo you right away.
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Grief, as I read somewhere once, is a lazy Susan. One day it is heavy and underwater, and the next day it spins and stops at loud and rageful, and the next day at wounded keening, and the next day numbness, silence.
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Trying to reason with an addict was like trying to blow out a lightbulb.
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I think this is how we are supposed to be in the world-present and in awe.
Anne Lamott
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Perfection is shallow, unreal, and fatally uninteresting.
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You want to give me chocolate and flowers? That would be great. I love them both. I just don't want them out of guilt, and I don't want them if you're not going to give them to all the people who helped mother our children.
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They always threw their arms around and hugged me while crying our Yiddish endearments. Yet none of them believed in God. They believed in social justice, good works, Israel, and Bette Midler. I was nearly thirty before I met a religious Jew.
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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... the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day. [pp. 65-66]
Anne Lamott
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only grieving can heal grief the passage of time will lessen the acuteness, but time alone, without the direct experience of grief, will not heal it.
Anne Lamott
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Everyone is flailing through this life without an owner's manual, with whatever modicum of grace and good humor we can manage.
Anne Lamott
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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
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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