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When everything starts going wrong all at once, it is to protect something big and lovely that is trying to get itself born.

Anne Lamott

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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Something
Lovely
Protect
Wrong
Bigs
Born
Everything
Trying
Going
Starts

More quotes by 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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Novels ought to have hope at least, American novels ought to have hope. French novels don't need to. We mostly win wars, they lose them. Of course, they did hide more Jews than many other countries, and this is a form of winning.
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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To love yourself as you are is a miracle, and to seek yourself is to have found yourself for now. And now is all we have, and love is who we are.
Anne Lamott
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Life is like a recycling center, where all the concerns and dramas of humankind get recycled back and forth across the universe. But what you have to offer is your own sensibility, maybe your own sense of humor or insider pathos or meaning. All of us can sing the same song, and there will still be four billion different renditions.
Anne Lamott
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I read the same amount of nonfiction and fiction.
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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Rationality squeezes out much that is rich and juicy and fascinating.
Anne Lamott
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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.
Anne Lamott
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This business of having been issued a body is deeply confusing... Bodies are so messy and disappointing.
Anne Lamott
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No one can appropriate God, goodness, the Bible or Jesus. It just seems that way.
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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My father was a writer, so I grew up writing and reading and I was really encouraged by him.
Anne Lamott
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Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor, because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong. It is no wonder if we sometimes tend to take ourselves perhaps a bit too seriously.
Anne Lamott
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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.
Anne Lamott
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Now, if you ask me, what’s going on is that we’re all up to here in it, and probably the most important thing is that we not yell at one another.
Anne Lamott
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Toni Morrison said, The function of freedom is to free someone else, and if you are no longer wracked or in bondage to a person or a way of life, tell your story. Risk freeing someone else. Not everyone will be glad that you did. Members of your family and other critics may wish you had kept your secrets. Oh, well, what are you going to do?
Anne Lamott
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...after a few days at the desk, telling the truth in an interesting way turns out to be as easy and pleasurable as bathing a cat.
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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You can get the monkey off your back, but the circus never leaves town
Anne Lamott