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My experience as a writer is that you really do write seven and eight pages to find the paragraph you were after all along.

Anne Lamott

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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Write
Find
Paragraph
Writing
Eight
Really
Pages
Seven
Along
Writer
Experience

More quotes by Anne Lamott

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A big heart is both a clunky and a delicate thing it doesn't protect itself and it doesn't hide. It stands out, like a baby's fontanel, where you can see the soul pulse through.
Anne Lamott
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Bananas are great, as I believe them to be the only known cure for existential dread. Also, Mother Teresa said that in India, a woman dying in the street will share her banana with anyone who needs it, whereas in America, people amass and hoard as many bananas as they can to sell for an exorbitant profit. So half of them go bad, anyway.
Anne Lamott
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Forgiveness means it finally becomes unimportant that you hit back. You're done. It doesn't necessarily mean that you want to have lunch with the person. If you keep hitting back, you stay trapped in the nightmare.
Anne Lamott
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I have a very dark sense of humor. I swear. I have a very playful relationship with Jesus.
Anne Lamott
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I think joy and sweetness and affection are a spiritual path. We're here to know God, to love and serve God, and to be blown away by the beauty and miracle of nature. You just have to get rid of so much baggage to be light enough to dance, to sing, to play. You don't have time to carry grudges you don't have time to cling to the need to be right.
Anne Lamott
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Sometimes this human stuff is slimy and pathetic...but better to feel it and talk about it and walk through it than to spend a lifetime being silently poisoned.
Anne Lamott
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When you make friends with fear, it can’t rule you.
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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I read the same amount of nonfiction and fiction.
Anne Lamott
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To be great, art has to point somewhere.
Anne Lamott
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The beauty of modesty ... a virtue the world doesn't have much truck with: one ordinary flower in a vase, as opposed to a bouquet.
Anne Lamott
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The problem with God - or at any rate, one of the top five most annoying things about God - is that he or she rarely answers right away.
Anne Lamott
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The worst time in any writer's life is the two months before publication. ALL writers become mental and pathetic, even those of devout faith, who have some psychological healing to lean up against, and gorgeous lives. All writers think that this time, the jig is up, and they will be exposed as frauds.
Anne Lamott
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You want to protect your child from pain, and what you get instead is life, and grace and though theologians insist that grace is freely given, the truth is that sometimes you pay for it through the nose. And you can't pay your child's way.
Anne Lamott
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Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor.
Anne Lamott
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I am going to try to pay attention to the spring. I am going to look around at all the flowers, and look up at the hectic trees. I am going to close my eyes and listen.
Anne Lamott
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Clutter and mess show us that life is being lived.
Anne Lamott
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...most of the time, all you have is the moment, and the imperfect love of the people around you.
Anne Lamott
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I used to love to untangle chains when I was a child. I had thin, busy fingers, and I never gave up. Perhaps there was a psychiatric component to my concentration but like much of my psychic damage, this worked to everyone's advantage.
Anne Lamott
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[Her] work taught me that you could be all the traditional feminine things -- a mother, a lover, a listener, a nurturer -- and you could also be critically astute and radical and have a minority opinion that was profoundly moral.
Anne Lamott