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Your problem is how you are going to spend this one odd and precious life you have been issued. Whether you're going to spend it trying to look good and creating the illusion that you have power over people and circumstances, or whether you are going to taste it, enjoy it and find out the truth about who you are.
Anne Lamott
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A priest friend of mine has cautioned me away from the standard God of our childhoods, who loves and guides you and then, if you are bad, roasts you: God as high school principal in a gray suit who never remembered your name but is always leafing unhappily through your files.
Anne Lamott
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If you are a writer, or want to be a writer, this is how you spend your days—listening, observing, storing things away, making your isolation pay off. You take home all you've taken in, all that you've overheard, and you turn it into gold. (Or at least you try.)
Anne Lamott
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The three things I cannot change are the past, the truth, and you.
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The problem is acceptance, which is something we're taught not to do. We're taught to improve uncomfortable situations, to change things, alleviate unpleasant feelings. But if you accept the reality that you have been given- that you are not in a productive creative period- you free yourself to begin filling up again.
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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.
Anne Lamott
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Very few writers really know what they are doing until they have done it.
Anne Lamott
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You are going to have to give and give and give, or there's no reason for you to be writing. You have to give from the deepest part of yourself, and you are going to have to go on giving, and the giving is going to have to be its own reward. There is no cosmic importance to your getting something published, but there is in learning to be a giver.
Anne Lamott
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Summer nearly does me in every year. It's too hot and the light is unforgiving and the days go on way too long.
Anne Lamott
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Prayer is talking to something or anything with which we seek union, even if we are bitter or insane or broken. (In fact, these are probably the best possible conditions under which to pray.) Prayer is taking a chance that against all odds and past history, we are loved and chosen, and do not have to get it together before we show up.
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This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense of--please forgive me--wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small, bordered worlds.
Anne Lamott
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I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all it is cracked up to be. But writing is.
Anne Lamott
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I'm human, you're human, let me greet your humanness. Let's be people together for a while.
Anne Lamott
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Frequently, as so many poets and psalmists and songwriters have said, the invisible shift happens through the broken places.
Anne Lamott
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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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All I ever wanted since I arrived here on Earth were the things that turned out to be within reach. The same things I needed as a baby - to go from cold to warm, lonely to held, the vessel to the giver, empty to full. You can change the world with a hot bath, if you sink into it from a place of knowing that you are worth profound care, even when you're dirty and rattled. Who knew?
Anne Lamott
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If God was giving me a ham, I'd be crazy not to receive it. Maybe it was the ham of God, who takes away the sins of the world.
Anne Lamott
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My deepest belief is that to live as if we're dying can set us free. Dying people teach you to pay attention and to forgive and not to sweat the small things.
Anne Lamott
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My understanding is that you get to choose which of your thoughts to go with.
Anne Lamott
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I get thirsty people glasses of water, even if that thirsty person is just me.
Anne Lamott
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Gratitude begins in our hearts and then dovetails into behavior. It almost always makes you willing to be of service, which is where the joy resides.
Anne Lamott
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I do believe that God is with us even when we're at our craziest and that this goodness guides, provides, and protects.
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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The best thing about being an artist, instead of a madman or someone who writes letters to the editor, is that you get to engage in satisfying work. Even if you never publish a word, you have something important to pour yourself into.
Anne Lamott
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When he sees little kids sitting in the backseat of cars, in those little car seats that have steering wheels, with grim expressions of concentration on their faces, clearly convinced that their efforts are causing the car to do whatever it is doing, he thinks of himself and his relationship with God: God who drives along silently, gently amused, in the real driver's seat.
Anne Lamott
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Quote of the day
That liberty is a great thing we may know from our own feelings, and we may likewise judge so from the conduct of the white-people, in the late war.
Jupiter Hammon
Anne Lamott
Born:
April 10, 1954
(age 70)
Bio:
Anne Lamott is an American novelist and non-fiction writer.
Known for:
Bird by Bird (1994)
Traveling Mercies (1999)
Help, Thanks, Wow (2012)
Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith (2007)
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