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The first draft is the child's draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later.

Anne Lamott

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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
First
Pour
Children
Shape
Going
Shapes
Later
Knowing
Child
Place
Romp
Firsts
Draft

More quotes by Anne Lamott

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Everybody thinks their opinion is the right one. If they didn't, they would get a new one.
Anne Lamott
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You get your confidence and intuition back by trusting yourself, by being militantly on your own side. ... Don't look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.
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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Human lives are hard, even those of health and privilege, and don't make much sense. This is the message of the Book of Job: Any snappy explanation of suffering you come up with will be horseshit.
Anne Lamott
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My mother might find a thin gold chain at the back of a drawer, wadded into an impossibly tight knot, and give it to me to untangle. It would have a shiny, sweaty smell, and excite me: Gold chains linked you to the great fairy tales and myths, to Arabia, and India to the great weight of the world, but lighter than a feather.
Anne Lamott
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My mind is a neighborhood I try not to go into alone.
Anne Lamott
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Living on Earth has always been a dangerous way to spend your time.
Anne Lamott
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Forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a better past.
Anne Lamott
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I understood that the man I was calling for could never ever come back. Because I understood that the man that I was calling for was dead.
Anne Lamott
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I write because writing is the gift God has given me to help people in the world.
Anne Lamott
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Writing takes a combination of sophistication and innocence it takes conscience, our belief that something is beautiful because it is right.
Anne Lamott
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It's incredibly touching when someone who seems so hopeless finds a few inches of light to stand in and makes everything work as well as possible. All of us lurch and fall, sit in the dirt, are helped to our feet, keep moving, feel like idiots, lose our balance, gain it, help others get back on their feet, and keep going.
Anne Lamott
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...music is about as physical as it gets: your essential rhythm is your heartbeat your essential sound, the breath. We're walking temples of noise, and when you add tender hearts to this mix, it somehow lets us meet in places we couldn't get to any other way.
Anne Lamott
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And you try to quiet your mind so you can hear.
Anne Lamott
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Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious.
Anne Lamott
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The stuff I write about is pretty universal, the things my closest friends and I talk about - our anxiety about being here on this scary planet, during these scary times, as vulnerable as kittens, having lost so many people I couldn't live without.
Anne Lamott
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Forgiveness means it finally becomes unimportant that you hit back.
Anne Lamott
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Anything you say from your heart to God is a prayer. But why is rarely a useful question. When Job keeps asking God why he has had such loss and suffering, God says, You wouldn't understand. I always want to know why, and I almost never have a good answer.
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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No one tells you that your life is effectively over when you have a child: that you're never going to draw another complacent breath again... or that whatever level of hypochondria and rage you'd learned to repress and live with is going to seem like the good old days.
Anne Lamott