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My deepest belief is that to live as if we're dying can set us free. Dying people teach you to pay attention and to forgive and not to sweat the small things.

Anne Lamott

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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Belief
Deepest
Attention
Sweat
Free
Forgive
Live
Forgiving
Things
Dying
People
Pay
Teach
Small

More quotes by Anne Lamott

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I liked those ladies! They were helpers, and they danced.' These are the words I want on my gravestone: that I was a helper, and that I danced.
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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]
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Sometimes I think that Jesus watches my neurotic struggles, and shakes his head and grips his forehead and starts tossing back mojitos.
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Good writing is about telling the truth.
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All these people keep waxing sentimental about how fabulously well I am doing as a mother, how competent I am, but I feel inside like when you're first learning to put nail polish on your right hand with your left. You can do it, but it doesn't look all that great around the cuticles.
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Being a parent is absolutely exhausting and draining, along with all the joy and love.
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The truth is that progress is usually small and sneaky.
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Most of me was glad when my mother died. She was a handful, but not in a cute, festive way. More in a life-threatening way, that had caused me a long time ago to give up all hope of ever feeling good about having had her as a mother.
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All criticism hurts me. I'm so in the wrong business.
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I sat down in the sand, breathless with shame and failure. God, I thought, some defender of the weak. Some freedom fighter: Joan of Arc in sunscreen.
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It is in many people's best interest for you not to find yourself, but it only matters that it is in yours, and the whole world's, to proceed.
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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.
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All parents are an embarrassment to their kids. Often grandparents are the relief. Kids don't have to resist you.
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You can either practice being right or practice being kind.
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Trying to reason with an addict was like trying to blow out a lightbulb.
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Then the singing enveloped me. It was furry and resonant, coming from everyone's very heart. There was no sense of performance or judgment, only that the music was breath and food.
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All I ever wanted since I arrived here on earth are the same things I needed as a baby, to go from cold to warm, lonely to held, the vessel to the giver, empty to full.
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Writing is about hypnotizing yourself into believing in yourself, getting some work done, then unhypnotizing yourself and going over the material coldly.
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For twenty years I have ached to go back home, when there was nobody there to whom I could return.
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There is ecstasy in paying attention.
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