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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
Show
Understand
Helping
Behave
Shows
Friendship
Live
Books
Dies
Book
Community
Mean
Help

More quotes by Anne Lamott

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I think that is why we stay close to our families, no matter how neurotic the members, how deeply annoying or dull- because when people have seen you at your worst, you don’t have to put on the mask as much.
Anne Lamott
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Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up.
Anne Lamott
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That's about 90 percent of my theological life - radical self-care. Put your own oxygen mask on first. I watch the self-talk that goes through my mind, and if I am being critical with myself, I shake myself out of it.
Anne Lamott
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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
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Shirley Jackson said that a confused reader is an antagonistic reader, and I live by that. It's okay to start anywhere, and to let yourself write a big sloppy overly-detailed first draft. You just jump in, knowing that the water will be cold at first, but no one is making you swim.
Anne Lamott
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I think drugs are part of the magical possibilities of youth and I wouldn't be here if I had continued with it.
Anne Lamott
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My best teachers were mess, failure, death, mistakes, and the people I hated, including myself.
Anne Lamott
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I liked those ladies! They were helpers, and they danced.' These are the words I want on my gravestone: that I was a helper, and that I danced.
Anne Lamott
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The problem is acceptance, which is something we're taught not to do. We're taught to improve uncomfortable situations, to change things, alleviate unpleasant feelings. But if you accept the reality that you have been given- that you are not in a productive creative period- you free yourself to begin filling up again.
Anne Lamott
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Sometimes grace is a ribbon of mountain air that gets in through the cracks.
Anne Lamott
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Her purse was a weight, ballast it tethered her to the earth as her mind floated away.
Anne Lamott
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Sometimes I think that Jesus watches my neurotic struggles, and shakes his head and grips his forehead and starts tossing back mojitos.
Anne Lamott
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Charles had once remarked that holding onto a resentment was like eating rat poison and waiting for the rat to die.
Anne Lamott
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But it was the singing that pulled me in and split me wide open.
Anne Lamott
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Hope begins in the dark.
Anne Lamott
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Nothing can be delicious when you are holding your breath.
Anne Lamott
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Over and over I feel as if my characters know who they are, and what happens to them, and where they have been and where they will go, and what they are capable of doing, but they need me to write it down for them because their handwriting is so bad.
Anne Lamott
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Laughter is the key that grace has arrived.
Anne Lamott
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It's intrusive for grandparents to think they're in charge. It's manipulative. Also, it's self-destructive, since if the parents have to resist you, you won't get your mitts on the kid as often.
Anne Lamott
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You have to be a warrior and say, Maybe it's everyone else's system, but it's not mine. (from her recent interview here, on Goodreads)
Anne Lamott