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Tell the truth as you understand it. If you're a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act - truth is always subversive.

Anne Lamott

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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Tell
Truth
Always
Subversive
Revolutionary
Obligation
Writer
Moral
Understand

More quotes by Anne Lamott

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Raising a child, whether or not it is yours, is like Nautilus of the heart and soul.
Anne Lamott
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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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When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again.
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Good writing is about telling the truth.
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I was raised with no religious training or influence. Except the influence was to be a moral and ethical person at the secular level. And to be a peace marcher, an activist for civil rights, peace and justice.
Anne Lamott
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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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Laughter is carbonated holiness.
Anne Lamott
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There are these people who keep taking you in and feeding you and loving you and making the world a tiny bit safer than it feels. People have community and family, but existentially we are deeply isolated.
Anne Lamott
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After a while the middle-aged person who lives in her head begins to talk to her soul, the kid.
Anne Lamott
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My writer friends, and they are legion, do not go around beaming with quiet feelings of contentment. Most of them go around with haunted, abused, surprised looks on their faces, like lab dogs on whom very personal deodorant sprays have been tested.
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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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.
Anne Lamott
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Prayer means that, in some unique way, we believe we're invited into a relationship with someone who hears us when we speak in silence.
Anne Lamott
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Slowly, after dozens of rejection slips and failures and false starts and postponed dreams - what Langston Hughes called dreams deferred - I stepped onto the hallowed ground of being a published novelist, and then 15 years later, I even started to make real money.
Anne Lamott
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You want to protect your child from pain, and what you get instead is life, and grace and though theologians insist that grace is freely given, the truth is that sometimes you pay for it through the nose. And you can't pay your child's way.
Anne Lamott
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These are pictures of the people in my family where we look like the most awkward and desperate folk you ever saw, poster children for the human condition.
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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How do you begin? The answer is simple: you decide to.
Anne Lamott
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if you want to know how God feels about money, look at whom she gives it to.
Anne Lamott
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If we stay where we are, where we're stuck, where we're comfortable and safe, we die there... When nothing new can get in, that's death.
Anne Lamott