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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
Book
Dies
Mean
Community
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More quotes by Anne Lamott

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Everything takes me forever. It's all lurch, flail. I hope that is good news to you writers.
Anne Lamott
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I don't think you have time to waste not writing because you are afraid you won't be good at it.
Anne Lamott
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There are these people who keep taking you in and feeding you and loving you and making the world a tiny bit safer than it feels. People have community and family, but existentially we are deeply isolated.
Anne Lamott
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Grace means you're in a different universe from where you had been stuck, when you had absolutely no way to get there on your own.
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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Don't look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.
Anne Lamott
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You know how I always say that laughter is carbonated holiness? Well, Robin was the ultimate proof of that, and bubbles are spirit made visible.
Anne Lamott
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My heart was broken and my head was just barely inhabitable
Anne Lamott
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And that almost everyone was struggling to wake up, to be loved, and not feel so afraid all the time. That's what the cars, degrees, booze, and drugs were about.
Anne Lamott
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Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life Besides, perfectionism will ruin your writing, blocking inventiveness and playfulness and life force (these are words we are allowed to use in California).
Anne Lamott
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A hundred years from now? All new people.
Anne Lamott
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Try to write in a directly emotional way, instead of being too subtle or oblique. Don't be afraid of your material or your past. Be afraid of wasting any more time obsessing about how you look and how people see you. Be afraid of not getting your writing done.
Anne Lamott
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If you don't die of thirst, there are blessings in the desert. You can be pulled into limitlessness, which we all yearn for, or you can do the beauty of minutiae, the scrimshaw of tiny and precise. The sky is your ocean, and the crystal silence will uplift you like great gospel music, or Neil Young.
Anne Lamott
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I do not know much about God and prayer, but I have come to believe over the last twenty-five years, that there's something to be said about keeping prayer simple. Help, Thanks, Wow.
Anne Lamott
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I've written six novels and four pieces of nonfiction, so I don't really have a genre these days.
Anne Lamott
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Life is really pretty tricky, and there's a lot of loss, and the longer you stay alive, the more people you lose whom you actually couldn't live without.
Anne Lamott
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My father was a writer, so I grew up writing and reading and I was really encouraged by him.
Anne Lamott
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That thing you had to force yourself to do-the actual act of writing-turns out to be the best part.
Anne Lamott
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Sometimes I think God loves the ones who most desperately ache and are most desperately lost - his or her wildest, most messed-up children - the way you'd ache and love a screwed-up rebel daughter in juvenile hall.
Anne Lamott
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All these people keep waxing sentimental about how fabulously well I am doing as a mother, how competent I am, but I feel inside like when you're first learning to put nail polish on your right hand with your left. You can do it, but it doesn't look all that great around the cuticles.
Anne Lamott