Quote

Shirley Jackson said that a confused reader is an antagonistic reader, and I live by that. It's okay to start anywhere, and to let yourself write a big sloppy overly-detailed first draft. You just jump in, knowing that the water will be cold at first, but no one is making you swim.

Anne Lamott

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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Write
Okay
Sloppy
Live
Reader
Overly
Firsts
Cold
Draft
First
Knowing
Jackson
Writing
Start
Jump
Water
Swim
Shirley
Bigs
Confused
Antagonistic
Making
Anywhere
Detailed

More quotes by Anne Lamott

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Laughter is carbonated holiness.
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He got me a cup of tea with honey, toast with honey, yogurt with honey, like I was John the Baptist with the flu.
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The reason 'help' is such a great prayer is that God is the gift of desperation. When you're in despair, you're teachable.
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You can get the monkey off your back, but the circus never leaves town
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Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there.
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If I have a huge audience, I'd like a bigger audience maybe slightly a slightly more illustrious audience.
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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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I am learning slowly to bring my crazy pinball-machine mind back to this place.
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Forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a better past.
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Forgiveness means it finally becomes unimportant that you hit back.
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The real payoff is the writing itself, that a day when you have gotten your work done is a good day, that total dedication is the point.
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There is ecstasy in paying attention. You can get into a kind of Wordsworthian openness to the world, where you see in everything the essence of holiness.
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I cry intermittently, like a summer rain. I don't feel racked by the crying in fact, it hydrates me. Then rage wells up in me, and I want to take a crowbar to all the cars in the neighborhood.
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I have a giant ego and terrible self-esteem, so I need to hit the re-set button fairly regularly - to get into presence, and humility, and being right-sized.
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Every woman's path is difficult, and many mothers were as equipped to raise children as wire monkey mothers. I say that without judgment: It is, sadly, true. An unhealthy mother's love is withering.
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You should not bring more items and hurdles to the obstacle course.
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I do not at all understand the mystery of grace - only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.
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Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.
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Very few writers really know what they are doing until they have done it.
Anne Lamott
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The movement of grace toward gratitude brings us from the package of self-obsessed madness to a spiritual awakening.
Anne Lamott