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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.

Anne Lamott

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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Self
Critical
First
Watches
Mind
Watch
Theological
Life
Percent
Oxygen
Goes
Shake
Talk
Shakes
Care
Mask
Firsts
Radical

More quotes by Anne Lamott

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One thing I know for sure about raising children is that every single day a kid needs discipline.... But also every single day a kid needs a break.
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There are moments when I am writing when I think that if other people knew how I felt right now, they’d burn me at the stake for feeling so good, so full, so much intense pleasure.
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No one tells you that your life is effectively over when you have a child: that you're never going to draw another complacent breath again... or that whatever level of hypochondria and rage you'd learned to repress and live with is going to seem like the good old days.
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If you have a problem you can solve by throwing money at it, you don't have a very interesting problem.
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Everything was coming together by coming apart . . . It is the most difficult Zen practice to leave people to their destiny, even though it's painful - just loving them, and breathing with them, and distracting them in a sweet way, and laughing with them . . . if something was not my problem, I probably did not have the solution.
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Can you imagine the hopelessness of trying to live a spiritual life when you’re secretly looking up at the skies not for illumination or direction, but to gauge, miserably, the odds of rain?
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It's a great time to be alive.
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Just don't pretend you know more about your characters than they do, because you don't. Stay open to them. It's teatime and all the dolls are at the table. Listen. It's that simple.
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Over and over I feel as if my characters know who they are, and what happens to them, and where they have been and where they will go, and what they are capable of doing, but they need me to write it down for them because their handwriting is so bad.
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I did not raise my son, Sam, to celebrate Mother's Day. I didn't want him to feel some obligation to buy me pricey lunches or flowers, some annual display of gratitude that you have to grit your teeth and endure.
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I used to tell my writing students that they must write the books they wished they could come upon - because then the books they hungered and thirsted for would exist.
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Gratitude, not understanding, is the secret to joy and equanimity.
Anne Lamott
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There is nothing as sweet as a comeback, when you are down and out, about to lose, and out of time.
Anne Lamott
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Once an old woman at my church said the secret is that God loves us exactly the way we are and that he loves us too much to let us stay like this, and I'm just trying to trust that.
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No is a complete sentence.
Anne Lamott
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I never had a particularly strong craving to procreate, except for earlier fantasies of wanting to be Marmee in Little Women.
Anne Lamott
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Being a parent is absolutely exhausting and draining, along with all the joy and love.
Anne Lamott
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Alice Adams wrote a sweet note to me after my first novel came out when I was 26, and I was so blown away that I sent her a bunch of stamps by return mail. I have no idea what I was thinking. It was a star-struck impulse.
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Don't look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.
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I went to church with my grandparents sometimes and I loved it.
Anne Lamott