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Reading poetry and reading the great works of the canon that we were reading in the '60s and the '70s and '80s was mind altering.

Anne Lamott

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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Altering
Canon
Poetry
Works
Reading
Great
Mind

More quotes by Anne Lamott

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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.
Anne Lamott
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I don't remember who said this, but there really are places in the heart you don't even know exist until you love a child.
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.
Anne Lamott
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One thing I know for sure about raising children is that every single day a kid needs discipline.... But also every single day a kid needs a break.
Anne Lamott
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Sometimes it takes failure to figure out who you aren't.
Anne Lamott
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If our lives are made up of a string of a thousand moments, at some of those moments we look a lot more spiritually evolved than at others.
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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If you are writing the clearest, truest words you can find and doing the best you can to understand and communicate, this will shine on paper like its own little lighthouse. Lighthouses dont go running all over an island looking for boats to save they just stand there shining.
Anne Lamott
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Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor, because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong. It is no wonder if we sometimes tend to take ourselves perhaps a bit too seriously.
Anne Lamott
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Nothing can be delicious when you are holding your breath.
Anne Lamott
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That thing you had to force yourself to do-the actual act of writing-turns out to be the best part.
Anne Lamott
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Creative expression, whether that means writing, dancing, bird-watching, or cooking, can give a person almost everything that he or she has been searching for: enlivenment, peace, meaning, and the incalculable wealth of time spent quietly in beauty.
Anne Lamott
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Charles had once remarked that holding onto a resentment was like eating rat poison and waiting for the rat to die.
Anne Lamott
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I went to Goucher College in Maryland for the best possible reasons - to learn - but then I dropped out at 19 for the best possible reasons - to become a writer.
Anne Lamott
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Laughter is carbonated holiness.
Anne Lamott
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We want a sense that an important character, like a narrator, is reliable. We want to believe that a character is not playing ages or being coy or being manipulative, but is telling the truth to the best of his or her ability...We do not wish to be crudely manipulated...We want to be massaged by a masseur, not whapped by a carpet beater.
Anne Lamott
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It's so great to be able to make people laugh, because this is so often how we get our selves back.
Anne Lamott
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by then I'd figured out the gift of failure, which is that it breaks through all that held breath and isometric tension about needing to look good: it's the gift of feeling floppier.
Anne Lamott
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Love is so much bigger than our ignorance.
Anne Lamott
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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