Quote

My natural tendency is to complicate everything--and then to spray words and ideas onto everything afterwards. I've had to develop the habit of keeping things simple.

Anne Lamott

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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Natural
Tendency
Ideas
Onto
Everything
Tendencies
Things
Keeping
Develop
Habit
Complicate
Simple
Spray
Words
Afterwards

More quotes by Anne Lamott

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Peace is joy at rest. Joy is peace on its feet. quoting her pastor in Salon, April 25, 2003
Anne Lamott
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I'm here to be me, which is taking a great deal longer than I had hoped.
Anne Lamott
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We write to expose the unexposed. If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. The writer's job is to turn the unspeakable into words - not just into any words, but if we can, into rhythm and blues.
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This is who I want to be in the world. This is who I think we are supposed to be, people who help call forth human beings from deep inside hopelessness.
Anne Lamott
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You keep working on your piece over and over, trying to get the sections and paragraphs and sentences and the whole just right, but there's a point at which you can tell you've begun hurting the work with your perfectionism. Then you have to release the work to new eyes.
Anne Lamott
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Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something—anything—down on paper. What I’ve learned to do when I sit down to work on a shitty first draft is to quiet the voices in my head.
Anne Lamott
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The truth is that progress is usually small and sneaky.
Anne Lamott
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So what are we supposed to do again, when we hate everything? You stop pretending life is such fun or makes sense. It's often messy and cruel and dull, and we do the best we can. It's unfair, and jerks seem to win. But you fall in love with a few people. Like I love you, Elizabeth. You're the angel God sent me.
Anne Lamott
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We all have the dark, ignorant shadow inside us. I have worked endlessly to reveal it and heal it in me, but of course there's some primitive weird stuff in me. The Tea Party is about exhorting white supremacy, though, so I've had a tiny bit of trouble experiencing sympathy.
Anne Lamott
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Don’t underestimate this gift of finding a place in the writing world: if you really work at describing creatively on paper the truth as you understand it, as you have experienced it, with the people or material who are in you, who are asking that you help them get written, you will come to a secret feeling of honor.
Anne Lamott
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And my fear of failure has been lifelong and deep. If you are what you do- and I think my parents may have accidentally given me this idea- and you do poorly, what then? It’s over you’re wiped out. All those prophecies you heard in the dark have come true, and people can see the real you, see what a schmendrick you are, what a fraud.
Anne Lamott
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What fills us is real, sweet, dopey, funny life.
Anne Lamott
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It's intrusive for grandparents to think they're in charge. It's manipulative. Also, it's self-destructive, since if the parents have to resist you, you won't get your mitts on the kid as often.
Anne Lamott
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There is nothing you can buy, achieve, own, or rent that can fill up that hunger inside for a sense of fulfillment and wonder.
Anne Lamott
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Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don't drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor's yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper.
Anne Lamott
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Greasy food is so comforting when you are hungover.
Anne Lamott
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Good writing is about telling the truth.
Anne Lamott
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At our most primitive we are storytellers and dancers.
Anne Lamott
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Rituals are a good signal to your unconscious that it is time to kick in.
Anne Lamott
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I'm kind of a gossip hound, but watching the media whip the small fires into giant forest fires so that they can cover the result is infuriating.
Anne Lamott