Quote

Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don't worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable worry about being absent or fraudulent.

Anne Lamott

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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Things
Vulnerability
Center
Straight
Toward
Unavailable
Emotional
Fraudulent
Worry
Appearing
Write
Absent
Writing
Sentimental

More quotes by Anne Lamott

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What fills us is real, sweet, dopey, funny life.
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What if you wake up some day, and you're 65... and you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life?
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I write because writing is the gift God has given me to help people in the world.
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The reason I never give up hope is because everything is so basically hopeless.
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At our most primitive we are storytellers and dancers.
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I think drugs are part of the magical possibilities of youth and I wouldn't be here if I had continued with it.
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I find most famous Christians to be full of themselves and of prejudice and self-loathing, masquerading as devout religious belief. I find all fundamentalism to be terrifying and very destructive.
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I liked those ladies! They were helpers, and they danced.' These are the words I want on my gravestone: that I was a helper, and that I danced.
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Perfection is shallow, unreal, and fatally uninteresting.
Anne Lamott
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Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life Besides, perfectionism will ruin your writing, blocking inventiveness and playfulness and life force (these are words we are allowed to use in California).
Anne Lamott
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It's almost like learning to meditate to learn to hear what your kid is actually saying.
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We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason why they write so little.
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Grace arrived, like the big, loopy stitches with which a grandmotherly stranger might baste your hem temporarily.
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The movement of grace toward gratitude brings us from the package of self-obsessed madness to a spiritual awakening.
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Most marriages are a mess, and the children get caught between two bitter, antagonistic parents. My parents stayed married for 27 unhappy years, till their kids were grown, and this was a catastrophe for us.
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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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The real payoff is the writing itself, that a day when you have gotten your work done is a good day, that total dedication is the point.
Anne Lamott
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Very few writers really know what they are doing until they have done it.
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For me, being a writer is not an altered state. It's very ponderous, and very - it's like being a shoemaker.
Anne Lamott
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It's good to do uncomfortable things. It's weight training for life.
Anne Lamott