Quote

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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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Make
Aren
Think
Becoming
Thinking
Mistake
Action
Women
Badass
Find
Follows
Take
Insight
Way
Mistakes

More quotes by 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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I don't think anything is the opposite of love.
Anne Lamott
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Perfectionism means that you try not to leave so much mess to clean up. But clutter and mess show us that life is being lived.
Anne Lamott
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And you try to quiet your mind so you can hear.
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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For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.
Anne Lamott
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Where do we even start on the daily walk of restoration and awakening? We start where we are.
Anne Lamott
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You simply keep putting down one damn word after the other, as you hear them, as they come to you. You can either set brick as a laborer or as an artist.
Anne Lamott
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Presents can make up for some of the disappointments that life doles out, such as it makes almost no sense and is coming to an end more quickly than ever.
Anne Lamott
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Everybody thinks their opinion is the right one. If they didn't, they would get a new one.
Anne Lamott
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...[T]here should be a real sense of your imagination and your memories walking and woolgathering, tramping the hills, romping all over the place. Trust them. Don't look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.
Anne Lamott
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I did not raise my son, Sam, to celebrate Mother's Day. I didn't want him to feel some obligation to buy me pricey lunches or flowers, some annual display of gratitude that you have to grit your teeth and endure.
Anne Lamott
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I've known for years that resentments don't hurt the person we resent, but they do hurt us.
Anne Lamott
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I wish I had thrown out the bathroom scale at age 16. Weighing yourself every morning is like waking up and asking Dick Cheney to validate your sense of inner worth.
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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I do know the sorrow of being ordinary, and that much of our life is spent doing the crazy mental arithmetic of how, at any given moment, we might improve, or at least disguise or present our defects and screw-ups in either more charming or more intimidating ways.
Anne Lamott
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Whenever the world throws rose petals at you, which thrill and seduce the ego, beware.
Anne Lamott
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I've always understood that meditation had to be part of - or was part of the natural path and so I've always sort of dabbled in it.
Anne Lamott
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Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something—anything—down on paper. What I’ve learned to do when I sit down to work on a shitty first draft is to quiet the voices in my head.
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