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If you fixate on the big picture, the whole shebang, the overview, you miss the stitching.

Anne Lamott

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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Stitching
Fixate
Overview
Miss
Picture
Missing
Bigs
Whole

More quotes by 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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Bananas are great, as I believe them to be the only known cure for existential dread. Also, Mother Teresa said that in India, a woman dying in the street will share her banana with anyone who needs it, whereas in America, people amass and hoard as many bananas as they can to sell for an exorbitant profit. So half of them go bad, anyway.
Anne Lamott
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I'm not going to change the way people think about me, but I can say you know what? I'm not going to carry that in my backpack.
Anne Lamott
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You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.
Anne Lamott
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If you are hoping to find your self-worth and fulfillment in other peoples' opinion of your writing, you will never find it.
Anne Lamott
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I can tell you that what you're looking for is already inside you.
Anne Lamott
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You don't want to spend your time around people who make you hold your breath. You can't fill up when you're holding your breath. And writing is about filling up, filling up when you are empty, letting images and ideas and smells run down like water - just as writing is also about dealing with the emptiness.
Anne Lamott
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I didn't need to understand the hypostatic unity of the Trinity I just needed to turn my life over to whoever came up with redwood trees.
Anne Lamott
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Toddlers can make you feel as if you have violated some archaic law in their personal Koran and you should die, infidel.
Anne Lamott
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But grace can be the experience of a second wind, when even though what you want is clarity and resolution, what you get is stamina and poignancy and the strength to hang on.
Anne Lamott
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Pay attention to the beauty surrounding you.
Anne Lamott
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I honestly think that in order to be a writer you have to learn to be reverent. If not, why are you writing? Why are you here?
Anne Lamott
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After a while the middle-aged person who lives in her head begins to talk to her soul, the kid.
Anne Lamott
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Many mornings I check out the news as soon as I wake up, because if it turns out that the world is coming to an end that day, I am going to eat the frosting off an entire carrot cake just for a start. Then I will move onto vats of clam dip, pots of crime brûlée, nachos, M & M's etc. Then I will max out both my credit cards.
Anne Lamott
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Lies cannot nourish or protect you. Only freedom from fear, freedom from lies, can make us beautiful, and keep us safe.
Anne Lamott
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My family tends to be pretty alcoholic and drug-addicted.
Anne Lamott
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Raising a child, whether or not it is yours, is like Nautilus of the heart and soul.
Anne Lamott
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A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way.
Anne Lamott
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And my fear of failure has been lifelong and deep. If you are what you do- and I think my parents may have accidentally given me this idea- and you do poorly, what then? It’s over you’re wiped out. All those prophecies you heard in the dark have come true, and people can see the real you, see what a schmendrick you are, what a fraud.
Anne Lamott
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The reason 'help' is such a great prayer is that God is the gift of desperation. When you're in despair, you're teachable.
Anne Lamott