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Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist's true friend.

Anne Lamott

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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Artist
True
Form
Messes
Mean
Perfectionism
Idealism
Frozen
Mess
Friend

More quotes by Anne Lamott

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I'm drawn to almost any piece of writing with the words 'divine love' and 'impeachment' in the first sentence. But I know the word 'divine' makes many progressive people run screaming for their cute little lives, and so one hesitates to use it.
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Anne Lamott’s priest friend Tom, how to get through: Left foot, right foot, left foot, breathe, he said. Right foot, left foot, right foot, breathe. Salon April 25, 2003
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I went to church with my grandparents sometimes and I loved it.
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For me, being a writer is not an altered state. It's very ponderous, and very - it's like being a shoemaker.
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Listen to your broccoli and it will tell you how to eat it.
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All freedom comes from discipline.
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The thing about light is that it really isn’t yours it’s what you gather and shine back. And it gets more power from reflectiveness if you sit still and take it in, it fills your cup, and then you can give it off yourself.
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Forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a better past.
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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.
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You have to be a warrior and say, Maybe it's everyone else's system, but it's not mine. (from her recent interview here, on Goodreads)
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Get to know your characters as well as you can let there be something at stake, and then let the chips fall where they may.
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And yet, I do believe there is ultimately meaning in the chaos, and also in the doldrums. What I resist is not the truth but when people put a pretty bow on scary things instead of saying, 'This is a nightmare. I hate everything. I’m going to go hide in the garage.'
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A nun I know once told me she kept begging God to take her character defects away from her. After years of this prayer, God finally got back to her: I'm not going to take anything away from you, you have to give it to Me.
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This is the most profound spiritual truth I know: that even when we're most sure that love can't conquer all, it seems to anyway. It goes down into the rat hole with us, in the guise of our friends, and there it swells and comforts. It gives us second winds, third winds, hundredth winds.
Anne Lamott
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I got a lot of things that society had promised would make me whole and fulfilled - all the things that the culture tells you from preschool on will quiet the throbbing anxiety inside you - stature, the respect of colleagues, maybe even a kind of low-grade fame.
Anne Lamott
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I devoured books like a person taking vitamins, afraid that otherwise I would remain this gelatinous narcissist, with no possibility of ever becoming thoughtful, of ever being taken seriously.
Anne Lamott
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I didn't write about my mother much in the third year after she died. I was still trying to get my argument straight: When her friends or our relatives wondered why I was still so hard on her, I could really lay out the case for what it had been like to be raised by someone who had loathed herself, her husband, even her own name.
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When you make friends with fear, it can’t rule you.
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What if we gave fifty percent of our discretionary budget to the world’s poor and then counted on the moral power of that action to protect us?
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You keep working on your piece over and over, trying to get the sections and paragraphs and sentences and the whole just right, but there's a point at which you can tell you've begun hurting the work with your perfectionism. Then you have to release the work to new eyes.
Anne Lamott