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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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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Happens
Asking
Character
Characters
Development
Involved
Relationship
Impose
Worry
Reveal
Lives
Plot
Keep
Creates

More quotes by Anne Lamott

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Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean they show us how to live and die.
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My friend Terry says that when you need to make a decision, in your work or otherwise, and you don’t know what to do, just do one thing or the other, because the worst that can happen is that you will have made a terrible mistake.
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Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor the enemy of the people. It will keep you insane your whole life.
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Publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is.
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The evidence is in, and you are the verdict.
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butterflies were wind energy made visible.
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Age has given me the gift of me it just gave me what I was always longing for, which was to get to be the woman I've already dreamt of being. Which is somebody who can do rest and do hard work and be a really constant companion, a constant, tender-hearted wife to myself.
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It's funny where we look for salvation, and where we actually find it.
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We want a sense that an important character, like a narrator, is reliable. We want to believe that a character is not playing ages or being coy or being manipulative, but is telling the truth to the best of his or her ability...We do not wish to be crudely manipulated...We want to be massaged by a masseur, not whapped by a carpet beater.
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Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious.
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I've seen prayers answered. But often, in my experiences, if you get what you pray for, you've really shortchanged yourself.
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Why couldn't Jesus command us to obsess over everything, to try to control and manipulate people, to try not to breathe at all, or to pay attention, stomp away to brood when people annoy us, and then eat a big bag of Hershey's Kisses in bed?
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If God was giving me a ham, I'd be crazy not to receive it. Maybe it was the ham of God, who takes away the sins of the world.
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Most people's intuitions are drowned out by folk sayings. We have a moment of real feeling or insight, and then we come up with a folk saying that captures the insight in a kind of wash. The intuition may be real and ripe, fresh with possibilities, but the folk saying is guaranteed to be a cliche, stale and self-contained.
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I woke up full of hate and fear the day before the most recent peace march in San Francisco. This was disappointing: I'd hoped to wake up feeling somewhere between Virginia Woolf and Wavy Gravy.
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Love is so much bigger than our ignorance.
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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.
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Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns.
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... the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day. [pp. 65-66]
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Human lives are hard, even those of health and privilege, and don't make much sense. This is the message of the Book of Job: Any snappy explanation of suffering you come up with will be horseshit.
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