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Tidiness makes me think of held breath, of suspended animation.

Anne Lamott

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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Makes
Think
Thinking
Tidiness
Suspended
Animation
Breath
Breaths
Held

More quotes by Anne Lamott

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Mothering has been the richest experience of my life, but I am still opposed to Mother's Day. It perpetuates the dangerous idea that all parents are somehow superior to non-parents.
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I like to read away as much of the afternoon as possible, until real life rears its ugly head.
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Age has given me what I was looking for my entire life - it gave me me. It provided the time and experience and failures and triumphs and friends who helped me step into the shape that had been waiting for me all my life...I not only get along with me most of the time now, I am militantly and maternally on my own side.
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So a moral position is not a message. A moral position is a passionate caring inside you.
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That thing you had to force yourself to do-the actual act of writing-turns out to be the best part.
Anne Lamott
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Everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, and scared, even the people who seem to have it more or less together. They are much more like you than you would believe. So try not to compare your insides to their outsides.
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Because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be?
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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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Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor, because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong. It is no wonder if we sometimes tend to take ourselves perhaps a bit too seriously.
Anne Lamott
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Life with most teenagers was like having a low-grade bladder infection. It hurts, but you had to tough it out.
Anne Lamott
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...the three things I cannot change are the past, the truth, and you.
Anne Lamott
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I have a very dark sense of humor. I swear. I have a very playful relationship with Jesus.
Anne Lamott
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It's funny where we look for salvation, and where we actually find it.
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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Dogs are the closest we come to knowing the divine love of God on this side of eternity.
Anne Lamott
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I quit my last real job, as a writer at a magazine, when I was twenty-one. That was the moment when I lost my place of prestige on the fast track, and slowly, millimeter by millimeter, I started to get found, to discover who I had been born to be, instead of the impossibly small package, all tied up tightly in myself, that I had agreed to be.
Anne Lamott
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I suspect that he was a child who thought differently than his peers, who may have had serious conversations with grown-ups, who as a young person, like me, accepted being alone quite a lot. I think that this sort of person often becomes either a writer or a career criminal.
Anne Lamott
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I loved every second of Catholic church. I loved the sickly sweet rotting-pomegranate smells of the incense. I loved the overwrought altar, the birdbath of holy water, the votive candles I loved that there was a poor box, the stations of the cross rendered in stained glass on the windows.
Anne Lamott
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There are moments when I am writing when I think that if other people knew how I felt right now, they’d burn me at the stake for feeling so good, so full, so much intense pleasure.
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