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My best teachers were mess, failure, death, mistakes, and the people I hated, including myself.

Anne Lamott

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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
People
Mess
Mistakes
Including
Failure
Teacher
Mistake
Death
Teachers
Best
Hated

More quotes by Anne Lamott

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I do not have deep theological understanding or opinion, but I do not read the Bible as the literal word of God.
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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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Or you might shout at the top of your lungs or whisper into your sleeve, I hate you, God. That is a prayer too, because it is real, it is truth, and maybe it is the first sincere thought you've had in months.
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The truth of my experience is that we are all a lot more alike than we are different.
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Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up.
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by then I'd figured out the gift of failure, which is that it breaks through all that held breath and isometric tension about needing to look good: it's the gift of feeling floppier.
Anne Lamott
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Mothers are supposed to listen and, afterward, to respond with some wisdom and perspective, but these things were not my mother's strong suit.
Anne Lamott
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Trying to reason with an addict was like trying to blow out a lightbulb.
Anne Lamott
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I don't see myself as a deep philosopher. The things I write about tend to be what we all have to face, or consider, or experience, that I talk about with my friends and brothers. It's universal stuff, told in my own voice, my own details and truth, which is all I have to offer.
Anne Lamott
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Radical self-care is quantum, and radiates out into the atmosphere, like a little fresh air.
Anne Lamott
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We all know we're going to die what's important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this.
Anne Lamott
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Being on a book tour is like being on the seesaw when you're a little kid. The excitement is in having someone to play with, and in rising up in the air, but then you're at the mercy of those holding you down, and if it's your older brother, or Paul Wolfowitz, they leap up, so that you crash down and get hurt.
Anne Lamott
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If your wife locks you out of the house, you don't have a problem with your door.
Anne Lamott
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I write everything as a wake-up call to myself and others, to anyone who may have gotten tired of hitting the snooze button.
Anne Lamott
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I used to love to untangle chains when I was a child. I had thin, busy fingers, and I never gave up. Perhaps there was a psychiatric component to my concentration but like much of my psychic damage, this worked to everyone's advantage.
Anne Lamott
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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.
Anne Lamott
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Looking back on the God my friend believed in, he seems a little erratic, not entirely unlike her father - God as borderline personality.
Anne Lamott
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You simply keep putting down one damn word after the other, as you hear them, as they come to you. You can either set brick as a laborer or as an artist.
Anne Lamott
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You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.
Anne Lamott
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...music is about as physical as it gets: your essential rhythm is your heartbeat your essential sound, the breath. We're walking temples of noise, and when you add tender hearts to this mix, it somehow lets us meet in places we couldn't get to any other way.
Anne Lamott