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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
Whole
Stitching
Fixate
Overview
Miss
Picture
Missing
Bigs

More quotes by Anne Lamott

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I try to write the books I would love to come upon that are honest, concerned with real lives, human hearts, spiritual transformation, families, secrets, wonder, craziness - and that can make me laugh.
Anne Lamott
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The miracle is that we are here, that no matter how undone we’ve been the night before, we wake up every morning and are still here. It is phenomenal just to be.
Anne Lamott
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Having a baby is like suddenly getting the world's worst roommate.
Anne Lamott
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Again and again I tell God I need help, and God says, 'Well, isn't that fabulous? Because I need help too. So you go get that old woman over there some water, and I'll figure out what we're going to do about your stuff.
Anne Lamott
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If our lives are made up of a string of a thousand moments, at some of those moments we look a lot more spiritually evolved than at others.
Anne Lamott
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Grace arrived, like the big, loopy stitches with which a grandmotherly stranger might baste your hem temporarily.
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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So a moral position is not a message. A moral position is a passionate caring inside you.
Anne Lamott
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You want to give me chocolate and flowers? That would be great. I love them both. I just don't want them out of guilt, and I don't want them if you're not going to give them to all the people who helped mother our children.
Anne Lamott
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if you want to know how God feels about money, look at whom she gives it to.
Anne Lamott
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My mother might find a thin gold chain at the back of a drawer, wadded into an impossibly tight knot, and give it to me to untangle. It would have a shiny, sweaty smell, and excite me: Gold chains linked you to the great fairy tales and myths, to Arabia, and India to the great weight of the world, but lighter than a feather.
Anne Lamott
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I took notes on the people around me, in my town, in my family, in my memory. I took notes on my own state of mind, my grandiosity, the low self-esteem. I wrote down the funny stuff I overheard. I learned to be like a ship's rat, veined ears trembling, and I learned to scribble it all down.
Anne Lamott
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Once an old woman at my church said the secret is that God loves us exactly the way we are and that he loves us too much to let us stay like this, and I'm just trying to trust that.
Anne Lamott
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I am going to try to pay attention to the spring. I am going to look around at all the flowers, and look up at the hectic trees. I am going to close my eyes and listen.
Anne Lamott
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My mother's eyes were large and brown, like my son's, but unlike Sam's, they were always frantic, like a hummingbird who can't quite find the flower but keeps jabbing around.
Anne Lamott
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When everything starts going wrong all at once, it is to protect something big and lovely that is trying to get itself born.
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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Needless to say, there was no one around remotely fitting the description of a normal person: I was at a writing conference.
Anne Lamott
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You can change the world with a hot bath, if you sink into it from a place of knowing that you are worth profound care, even when you're dirty and rattled.
Anne Lamott
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Good therapy helps. Good friends help. Pretending that we are doing better than we are doesn't. Shame doesn't. Being heard does.
Anne Lamott