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On the spiritual path, all the dreck and misery is transformed, maybe not that same day, but still transformed into spiritual fuel or insight.

Anne Lamott

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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Insight
Spirituality
Misery
Path
Maybe
Spiritual
Stills
Transformed
Still
Fuel

More quotes by Anne Lamott

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The problem is acceptance, which is something we're taught not to do. We're taught to improve uncomfortable situations, to change things, alleviate unpleasant feelings. But if you accept the reality that you have been given- that you are not in a productive creative period- you free yourself to begin filling up again.
Anne Lamott
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I am all the ages I've ever been.
Anne Lamott
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I thought such awful thoughts that I cannot even say them out loud because they would make Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish.
Anne Lamott
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Left to my own devices, my first inclination is to mess in other people's lives. I secretly believe my whole family, and really the whole world, is my responsibility.
Anne Lamott
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My parents, and librarians along the way, taught me about the space between words about the margins, where so many juicy moments of life and spirit and friendship could be found. In a library, you could find miracles and truth and you might find something that would make you laugh so hard that you get shushed, in the friendliest way.
Anne Lamott
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Laughter is carbonated holiness.
Anne Lamott
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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.
Anne Lamott
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Try to write in a directly emotional way, instead of being too subtle or oblique. Don't be afraid of your material or your past. Be afraid of wasting any more time obsessing about how you look and how people see you. Be afraid of not getting your writing done.
Anne Lamott
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We all know we're going to die what's important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this.
Anne Lamott
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You have to make mistakes to find out who you aren't. You take the action, and the insight follows: You don't think your way into becoming yourself.
Anne Lamott
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When I was young, I used to be so jealous of other girls that it crippled me.
Anne Lamott
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I've heard people say that God is the gift of desperation, and there's a lot to be said for having really reached a bottom where you've run out of any more good ideas or plans for everybody else's behavior or how to save and fix and rescue or just get out of a huge mess, possibly of your own creation.
Anne Lamott
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Grief, as I read somewhere once, is a lazy Susan. One day it is heavy and underwater, and the next day it spins and stops at loud and rageful, and the next day at wounded keening, and the next day numbness, silence.
Anne Lamott
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You are desperate to communicate, to edify or entertain, to preserve moments of grace or joy or transcendence, to make real or imagined events come alive. But you cannot will this to happen. It is a matter of persistence and faith and hard work. So you might as well just go ahead and get started.
Anne Lamott
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But grace can be the experience of a second wind, when even though what you want is clarity and resolution, what you get is stamina and poignancy and the strength to hang on.
Anne Lamott
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When you pray, you are not starting the conversation from scratch, just remembering to plug back into a conversation that's always in progress.
Anne Lamott
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When hope is not pinned wriggling onto a shiny image or expectation, it sometimes floats forth and opens like one of those fluted Japanese blossoms, flimsy and spastic, bright and warm. This almost always seems to happen in community.
Anne Lamott
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I like the desert for short periods of time, from inside a car, with the windows rolled up, and the doors locked. I prefer beach resorts with room service.
Anne Lamott
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only grieving can heal grief the passage of time will lessen the acuteness, but time alone, without the direct experience of grief, will not heal it.
Anne Lamott
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All criticism hurts me. I'm so in the wrong business.
Anne Lamott