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Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean they show us how to live and die.

Anne Lamott

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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Shows
Friendship
Live
Books
Book
Dies
Mean
Community
Help
Show
Understand
Helping
Behave

More quotes by Anne Lamott

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For too long, and despite what people told me, I had fallen for what the culture said about beauty, youth, features, heights, weights, hair textures, upper arms.
Anne Lamott
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It's better to be kind than to be right.
Anne Lamott
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I believe in listening to the - what calls you from your heart and your spirit and if you do it badly, like learning to dance, you do it badly or you're going to kick yourself when you grow old and you meant to do it.
Anne Lamott
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Don’t underestimate this gift of finding a place in the writing world: if you really work at describing creatively on paper the truth as you understand it, as you have experienced it, with the people or material who are in you, who are asking that you help them get written, you will come to a secret feeling of honor.
Anne Lamott
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When we're dealing with the people in our family - no matter how annoying or gross they may be, no matter how self-inflicted their suffering may appear, no matter how afflicted they are with ignorance, prejudice or nose hairs - we give from the deepest parts of ourselves.
Anne Lamott
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There is ecstasy in paying attention.
Anne Lamott
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I got one of the five golden tickets to be a writer, and I take that seriously. I don't love my own work at all, but I love my own self. I love that I've been given the chance to capture the stories that come through me.
Anne Lamott
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My coming to faith did not start with a leap but rather a series of staggers from what seemed like one safe place to another. Like lily pads, round and green, these places summoned and then held me up while I grew. Each prepared me for the next leaf on which I would land, and in this way I moved across the swamp of doubt and fear.
Anne Lamott
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You don't always have to chop with the sword of truth. You can point with it too.
Anne Lamott
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Very few writers really know what they are doing until they have done it.
Anne Lamott
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You can change the world with a hot bath, if you sink into it from a place of knowing that you are worth profound care, even when you're dirty and rattled.
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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...one of the worst things about being a parent, for me, is the self-discovery, the being face to face with one's secret insanity and brokenness and rage.
Anne Lamott
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...since you can't heal your own sick mind with your own sick mind, I needed to consult somebody else's sick mind.
Anne Lamott
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Grace is having a commitment to- or at least an acceptance of- being ineffective and foolish. That our bottled charm is the main roadblock to drinking that clear cool glass of love.
Anne Lamott
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It feels like I'm babysitting in the Twilight Zone. I keep waiting for the parents to show up because we are out of chips and diet cokes.
Anne Lamott
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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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I used to love to untangle chains when I was a child. I had thin, busy fingers, and I never gave up. Perhaps there was a psychiatric component to my concentration but like much of my psychic damage, this worked to everyone's advantage.
Anne Lamott
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I see that children fill the existential hollowness many people feel that when we have children, we know they will need us, and maybe love us, but we don't have a clue how hard it is going to be.
Anne Lamott
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Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor, because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong. It is no wonder if we sometimes tend to take ourselves perhaps a bit too seriously.
Anne Lamott