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Sometimes it takes failure to figure out who you aren't.

Anne Lamott

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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Figure
Figures
Aren
Failure
Takes
Sometimes

More quotes by Anne Lamott

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I like the desert for short periods of time, from inside a car, with the windows rolled up, and the doors locked. I prefer beach resorts with room service.
Anne Lamott
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Churches are good for prayer, but so are garages and cars and mountains and showers and dance floors.
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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You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the rational mind.
Anne Lamott
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Looking back on the God my friend believed in, he seems a little erratic, not entirely unlike her father - God as borderline personality.
Anne Lamott
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We can't understand when we're pregnant, or when our siblings are expecting, how profound it is to have a shared history with a younger generation: blood, genes, humor. It means we were actually here, on Earth, for a time - like the Egyptians with their pyramids, only with children.
Anne Lamott
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These days cry out, as never before, for us to pay attention, so we can move through them and get our joy and pride back.
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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When hope is not pinned wriggling onto a shiny image or expectation, it sometimes floats forth and opens.
Anne Lamott
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My gratitude for good writing is unbounded I’m grateful for it the way I’m grateful for the ocean.
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 just try to love and serve everyone, and bring everyone water, and lend an ear that's what Jesus said to do.
Anne Lamott
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Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul.
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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If you fixate on the big picture, the whole shebang, the overview, you miss the stitching.
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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Just don't pretend you know more about your characters than they do, because you don't. Stay open to them. It's teatime and all the dolls are at the table. Listen. It's that simple.
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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...music is about as physical as it gets: your essential rhythm is your heartbeat your essential sound, the breath. We're walking temples of noise, and when you add tender hearts to this mix, it somehow lets us meet in places we couldn't get to any other way.
Anne Lamott
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Gratitude, not understanding, is the secret to joy and equanimity.
Anne Lamott