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I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all it is cracked up to be. But writing is.

Anne Lamott

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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Trying
Encourage
People
Anyone
Hope
Write
Warn
Stills
Publication
Still
Cracked
Feels
Published
Writing
Compelled

More quotes by Anne Lamott

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... everyone has come to understand that unconditional love is a reality, but with as shelf life of about eight to ten seconds. [p. 110]
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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You just have to keep getting out of your own way so that whatever it is that wants to be written can use you to write it.
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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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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Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save they just stand there shining.
Anne Lamott
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I'm a terrible Christian and meditating is very hard for me, and I do it. I do it badly, like I do a lot of things. I believe in doing things badly.
Anne Lamott
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My experience as a writer is that you really do write seven and eight pages to find the paragraph you were after all along.
Anne Lamott
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I think drugs are part of the magical possibilities of youth and I wouldn't be here if I had continued with it.
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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A whole lot of us believers, of all different religions, are ready to turn back the tide of madness by walking together, in both the dark and the light - in other words, through life - registering voters as we go, and keeping the faith.
Anne Lamott
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All freedom comes from discipline.
Anne Lamott
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...because when people have seen you at their worst, you don't have to put on the mask as much.
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 can never tell what I'm doing when I'm in the middle of publication because I have no confidence. I have terrible self-esteem, along with boundless narcissism.
Anne Lamott
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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?
Anne Lamott
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It feels like I'm babysitting in the Twilight Zone. I keep waiting for the parents to show up because we are out of chips and diet cokes.
Anne Lamott
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The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little. But we do. We have so much we want to say and figure out.
Anne Lamott
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When I was a kid, our family used to watch 'Bonanza.' I really liked having a Sunday night TV ritual.
Anne Lamott
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I cry intermittently, like a summer rain. I don't feel racked by the crying in fact, it hydrates me. Then rage wells up in me, and I want to take a crowbar to all the cars in the neighborhood.
Anne Lamott