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
Firsts
Cold
Draft
First
Knowing
Jackson
Writing
Start
Jump
Water
Swim
Shirley
Bigs
Confused
Antagonistic
Making
Anywhere
Detailed
Write
Okay
Sloppy
Live
Reader
Overly

More quotes by Anne Lamott

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Life is like a recycling center, where all the concerns and dramas of humankind get recycled back and forth across the universe. But what you have to offer is your own sensibility, maybe your own sense of humor or insider pathos or meaning. All of us can sing the same song, and there will still be four billion different renditions.
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.
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I didn't need to understand the hypostatic unity of the Trinity I just needed to turn my life over to whoever came up with redwood trees.
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The clipping said forgiveness meant that God is for giving, and that we are here for giving too, and that to withold love or blessings is to be completely delusional.
Anne Lamott
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...because when people have seen you at their worst, you don't have to put on the mask as much.
Anne Lamott
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Radical self-care is quantum, and radiates out into the atmosphere, like a little fresh air.
Anne Lamott
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It feels like I'm babysitting in the Twilight Zone. I keep waiting for the parents to show up because we are out of chips and diet cokes.
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My mother's eyes were large and brown, like my son's, but unlike Sam's, they were always frantic, like a hummingbird who can't quite find the flower but keeps jabbing around.
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Having a baby is like suddenly getting the world's worst roommate.
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That's about 90 percent of my theological life - radical self-care. Put your own oxygen mask on first. I watch the self-talk that goes through my mind, and if I am being critical with myself, I shake myself out of it.
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This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won't wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be.
Anne Lamott
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To be a good writer, you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care. You do not have to have a complicated moral philosophy. But a writer always tries, I think, to be a part of a solution, to understand a little about life and to pass this on.
Anne Lamott
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Sometimes Heaven is just a new pair of glasses.
Anne Lamott
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The reason I never give up hope is because everything is so basically hopeless.
Anne Lamott
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I sat down in the sand, breathless with shame and failure. God, I thought, some defender of the weak. Some freedom fighter: Joan of Arc in sunscreen.
Anne Lamott
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My heart was broken and my head was just barely inhabitable
Anne Lamott
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Life is really pretty tricky, and there's a lot of loss, and the longer you stay alive, the more people you lose whom you actually couldn't live without.
Anne Lamott
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If you asked me, parents were supposed to affect the life of their child in such a way that the child grows up to be responsible, able to participate in life and in community.
Anne Lamott
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And as it turns out, if one person is praying for you, buckle up. Things can happen.
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I could become like that dyslexic agnostic in the old joke - the one who lies in bed and tries to figure out if his dog exists.
Anne Lamott