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You have to make mistakes to find out who you aren’t.

Anne Lamott

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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Mistakes
Aren
Mistake
Find
Make

More quotes by Anne Lamott

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Here are the two best prayers I know: 'Help me, help me, help me,' and 'Thank you, thank you, thank you.' A woman I know says, for her morning prayer, 'Whatever,' and then for the evening, 'Oh, well,' but has conceded that these prayers are more palatable for people without children.
Anne Lamott
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Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.
Anne Lamott
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Then the singing enveloped me. It was furry and resonant, coming from everyone's very heart. There was no sense of performance or judgment, only that the music was breath and food.
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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Forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a better past.
Anne Lamott
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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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Novels ought to have hope at least, American novels ought to have hope. French novels don't need to. We mostly win wars, they lose them. Of course, they did hide more Jews than many other countries, and this is a form of winning.
Anne Lamott
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Writing takes a combination of sophistication and innocence it takes conscience, our belief that something is beautiful because it is right.
Anne Lamott
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Looking back on the God my friend believed in, he seems a little erratic, not entirely unlike her father - God as borderline personality.
Anne Lamott
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What if we gave fifty percent of our discretionary budget to the world’s poor and then counted on the moral power of that action to protect us?
Anne Lamott
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The solution is always spiritual, and it almost never has anything to do with the problem ... laughter is carbonated holiness.
Anne Lamott
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You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories.
Anne Lamott
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You are desperate to communicate, to edify or entertain, to preserve moments of grace or joy or transcendence, to make real or imagined events come alive. But you cannot will this to happen. It is a matter of persistence and faith and hard work. So you might as well just go ahead and get started.
Anne Lamott
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Mostly what happens in the novels never happened in real life.
Anne Lamott
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Radical self-care is quantum, and radiates out into the atmosphere, like a little fresh air.
Anne Lamott
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Dogs are the closest we come to knowing the divine love of God on this side of eternity.
Anne Lamott
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Slowly, after dozens of rejection slips and failures and false starts and postponed dreams - what Langston Hughes called dreams deferred - I stepped onto the hallowed ground of being a published novelist, and then 15 years later, I even started to make real money.
Anne Lamott
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The women's movement burst forth when I was fifteen. That was when I began to believe that life might semi-work out after all. The cavalry had arrived. Women were starting to say that you got to tell the truth now, that you had to tell the truth if you were going to heal and have an authentic life.
Anne Lamott
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You are going to love some of your characters because they are you or some facet of you, and you are going to hate some of your characters for the same reason.
Anne Lamott
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Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns.
Anne Lamott