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For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.
Anne Lamott
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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Way
Fact
Write
Facts
Anything
Rapturous
Firsts
Drafts
First
Shitty
Writing
Writers
Really
Written
More quotes by Anne Lamott
Bananas are great, as I believe them to be the only known cure for existential dread. Also, Mother Teresa said that in India, a woman dying in the street will share her banana with anyone who needs it, whereas in America, people amass and hoard as many bananas as they can to sell for an exorbitant profit. So half of them go bad, anyway.
Anne Lamott
In fact, not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die.
Anne Lamott
Creative expression, whether that means writing, dancing, bird-watching, or cooking, can give a person almost everything that he or she has been searching for: enlivenment, peace, meaning, and the incalculable wealth of time spent quietly in beauty.
Anne Lamott
Seeing yourself in print is such an amazing concept: you can get so much attention without having to actually show up somewhere... You don't have to dress up, for instance, and you can't hear them boo you right away.
Anne Lamott
Can you imagine the hopelessness of trying to live a spiritual life when you’re secretly looking up at the skies not for illumination or direction, but to gauge, miserably, the odds of rain?
Anne Lamott
Summer nearly does me in every year. It's too hot and the light is unforgiving and the days go on way too long.
Anne Lamott
The problem with God - or at any rate, one of the top five most annoying things about God - is that he or she rarely answers right away.
Anne Lamott
I get to tell my truth. I get to seek meaning and realization. I get to live fully, wildly, imperfectly. That's why I'm alive. And all I actually have to offer as a writer is my version of life. Every single thing that has happened to me is mine.
Anne Lamott
No matter what circumstances, it's hard to be a parent and maintain a sense of self and identity in the world.
Anne Lamott
If you are a writer, or want to be a writer, this is how you spend your days--listening, observing, storing things away, making your isolation pay off. You take home all you've taken in, all that you've overheard, and you turn it into gold. (Or at least you try.)
Anne Lamott
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
It's good to do uncomfortable things. It's weight training for life.
Anne Lamott
I can never tell what I'm doing when I'm in the middle of publication because I have no confidence. I have terrible self-esteem, along with boundless narcissism.
Anne Lamott
I've always thought I could use my brain and my heart to jockey everyone around to the good. But life is not jockeyable. When you try, you make people infinitely crazier than they already were, including or especially yourself.
Anne Lamott
This is the most profound spiritual truth I know: that even when we're most sure that love can't conquer all, it seems to anyway. It goes down into the rat hole with us, in the guise of our friends, and there it swells and comforts. It gives us second winds, third winds, hundredth winds.
Anne Lamott
You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the rational mind. The rational mind doesn't nourish you. You assume that it gives you the truth, because the rational mind is the golden calf that this culture worships, but this is not true. Rationality squeezes out much that is rich and juicy and fascinating.
Anne Lamott
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
I'm here to be me, which is taking a great deal longer than I had hoped.
Anne Lamott
Because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be?
Anne Lamott
I do believe that God is with us even when we're at our craziest and that this goodness guides, provides, and protects.
Anne Lamott