Quote

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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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Feels
Tiny
World
Loving
People
Taking
Bits
Existentially
Community
Safer
Family
Feeding
Making
Isolated
Keep
Deeply

More quotes by Anne Lamott

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We can't understand when we're pregnant, or when our siblings are expecting, how profound it is to have a shared history with a younger generation: blood, genes, humor. It means we were actually here, on Earth, for a time - like the Egyptians with their pyramids, only with children.
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Her purse was a weight, ballast it tethered her to the earth as her mind floated away.
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Don't look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.
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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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I took notes on the people around me, in my town, in my family, in my memory. I took notes on my own state of mind, my grandiosity, the low self-esteem. I wrote down the funny stuff I overheard. I learned to be like a ship's rat, veined ears trembling, and I learned to scribble it all down.
Anne Lamott
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She lived in fear of ifonic endings.
Anne Lamott
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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.
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Sometimes, no matter how screwed up things seem, I feel like we're all at a wedding. But you can't just come out and say, We're at a wedding! Have some cake! You need to create a world into which we can enter, a world where we can see this.
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I don't know much, but I understand how entirely doomed I am without God.
Anne Lamott
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Some people won't go the extra mile, and then on their birthday, when no one makes a fuss, they feel neglected and bitter.
Anne Lamott
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Getting into a new relationship is like pouring Miracle-Gro on your character defects.
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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Reading poetry and reading the great works of the canon that we were reading in the '60s and the '70s and '80s was mind altering.
Anne Lamott
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When hope is not pinned wriggling onto a shiny image or expectation, it sometimes floats forth and opens.
Anne Lamott
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You are desperate to communicate, to edify or entertain, to preserve moments of grace or joy or transcendence, to make real or imagined events come alive. But you cannot will this to happen. It is a matter of persistence and faith and hard work. So you might as well just go ahead and get started.
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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.
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It was simple reality - most competitive tennis players in my day were privileged, spoiled, entitled and white. Also, many of them were beautiful, fit, tan and of good stock - great big hair and white teeth and long legs. Then there were the rest of us.
Anne Lamott
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Rationality squeezes out much that is rich and juicy and fascinating.
Anne Lamott
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...most of the time, all you have is the moment, and the imperfect love of the people around you.
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What people somehow forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here.
Anne Lamott