Quote

To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass.

Anne Lamott

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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Mind
Engrossed
Something
Antidote
Frequently
Ass
Rational
Outside
Head
Powerful

More quotes by Anne Lamott

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This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won't wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be.
Anne Lamott
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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.
Anne Lamott
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Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don't drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor's yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper.
Anne Lamott
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What if you wake up some day, and you're 65... and you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life?
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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You have to make mistakes to find out who you aren't. You take the action, and the insight follows: You don't think your way into becoming yourself.
Anne Lamott
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The problem with God - or at any rate, one of the top five most annoying things about God - is that he or she rarely answers right away.
Anne Lamott
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For me, being a writer is not an altered state. It's very ponderous, and very - it's like being a shoemaker.
Anne Lamott
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If you have a problem you can solve by throwing money at it, you don't have a very interesting problem.
Anne Lamott
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I was raised with no religious training or influence. Except the influence was to be a moral and ethical person at the secular level. And to be a peace marcher, an activist for civil rights, peace and justice.
Anne Lamott
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...after a few days at the desk, telling the truth in an interesting way turns out to be as easy and pleasurable as bathing a cat.
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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Any plot you impose on your characters will be onomatopoetic: PLOT. I say don't worry about plot. Worry about the characters. Let what they say or do reveal who they are, and be involved in their lives, and keep asking yourself, Now what happens? The development of relationship creates plot.
Anne Lamott
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Good writing is about telling the truth.
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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It's almost like learning to meditate to learn to hear what your kid is actually saying.
Anne Lamott
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Frequently, as so many poets and psalmists and songwriters have said, the invisible shift happens through the broken places.
Anne Lamott
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Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there.
Anne Lamott
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I went to church with my grandparents sometimes and I loved it.
Anne Lamott
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I remember staring at my son endlessly when he was an infant, stunned by his very existence, wondering where on earth he had come from.
Anne Lamott