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The difference between a writer who toughs it out and one who doesn't is that you push through the parts where you know that you've just written seven pages when all you're looking for is one paragraph.

Anne Lamott

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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Writer
Differences
Written
Paragraph
Looking
Push
Doesn
Parts
Pages
Seven
Difference

More quotes by Anne Lamott

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We must not inflict life on children who will be resented we must not inflict unwanted children on society.
Anne Lamott
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I naturally prefer the company of people who hold grudges, as long as they are not held against me.
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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Age has given me what I was looking for my entire life - it gave me me. It provided the time and experience and failures and triumphs and friends who helped me step into the shape that had been waiting for me all my life...I not only get along with me most of the time now, I am militantly and maternally on my own side.
Anne Lamott
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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.
Anne Lamott
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I suspect that he was a child who thought differently than his peers, who may have had serious conversations with grown-ups, who as a young person, like me, accepted being alone quite a lot. I think that this sort of person often becomes either a writer or a career criminal.
Anne Lamott
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I like to read away as much of the afternoon as possible, until real life rears its ugly head.
Anne Lamott
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Alice Adams wrote a sweet note to me after my first novel came out when I was 26, and I was so blown away that I sent her a bunch of stamps by return mail. I have no idea what I was thinking. It was a star-struck impulse.
Anne Lamott
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Prayer is talking to something or anything with which we seek union, even if we are bitter or insane or broken. (In fact, these are probably the best possible conditions under which to pray.) Prayer is taking a chance that against all odds and past history, we are loved and chosen, and do not have to get it together before we show up.
Anne Lamott
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The evidence is in, and you are the verdict.
Anne Lamott
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And she is going to dance, dance hungry, dance full, dance each cold astonishing moment, now when she is young and again when she is old.
Anne Lamott
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So how on earth can I bring a child into the world, knowing that such sorrow lies ahead, that it is such a large part of what it means to be human? I'm not sure. That's my answer: I'm not sure.
Anne Lamott
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If I were going to begin practicing the presence of God for the first time today, it would help to begin by admitting the three most terrible truths of our existence: that we are so ruined, and so loved, and in charge of so little.
Anne Lamott
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When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again.
Anne Lamott
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Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up.
Anne Lamott
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I love silence. I seek and create it at every opportunity. I need it to work.
Anne Lamott
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Grief is just so scary.... If we finally begin to cry all those suppressed tears, they will surely wash us away like the Mississippi River. That's what our parents told us. We got sent to our rooms for having huge feelings. In my family, if you cried or got angry, you didn't get dinner.
Anne Lamott
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Toddlers can make you feel as if you have violated some archaic law in their personal Koran and you should die, infidel.
Anne Lamott
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All I know is that after 10 years of being sober, with huge support to express my pain and anger and shadow, the grief and tears didn’t wash me away. They gave me my life back! They cleansed me, baptized me, hydrated the earth at my feet. They brought me home, to me, to the truth of me.
Anne Lamott
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I love memoirs. They are probably my favorite literary form, along with biographies. The more confessional, the better. There is so, so, so little truth in the popular culture, and I am starved and grateful for any I can find.
Anne Lamott