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Anne Lamott -
Bird by Bird (1994)
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You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the rational mind.
Anne Lamott
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Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.
Anne Lamott
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Your unconscious can't work when you are breathing down its neck.
Anne Lamott
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If you want to know how God feels about money, look at whom she gives it to.
Anne Lamott
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There's an image I've heard people in recovery use—that getting all of one's addictions under control is a little like putting an octopus to bed.
Anne Lamott
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If we can believe in the Gnostic gospel of Thomas, old Uncle Jesus said, "If you bring forth what is inside you, what you bring forth will save you. If you don't bring forth what is inside you, what you bring forth can destroy you.
Anne Lamott
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Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don't drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor's yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper.
Anne Lamott
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Get to know your characters as well as you can let there be something at stake, and then let the chips fall where they may.
Anne Lamott
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We write to expose the unexposed. If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. Otherwise, you'll just be rearranging furniture in rooms you've already been in.
Anne Lamott
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A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way.
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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I suspect that he was a child who thought differently than his peers, who may have had serious conversations with grown-ups, who as a young person, like me, accepted being alone quite a lot. I think that this sort of person often becomes either a writer or a career criminal.
Anne Lamott
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In this dark and wounded society, writing can give you the pleasures of the woodpecker, of hollowing out a hole in a tree where you can build your own nest and say, This is my niche, this is where I live now, this is where I belong.
Anne Lamott
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Clutter and mess show us that life is being lived.... Tidiness makes me think of held breath, of suspended animation.... Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist's true friend. What people somehow forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here.
Anne Lamott
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To be a good writer, you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care. You do not have to have a complicated moral philosophy. But a writer always tries, I think, to be a part of a solution, to understand a little about life and to pass this on.
Anne Lamott
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All of us can sing the same song, and there will still be four billion different renditions. Some people will sing it spontaneously, with a lot of soulful riffs, while others are going to practice until they could sing it at the Met.
Anne Lamott
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You can either set brick as a laborer or as an artist. You can make the work a chore, or you can have a good time. You can do it the way you used to clear the dinner dishes when you were thirteen, or you can do it as a Japanese person would perform a tea ceremony, with a level of concentration and care in which you can lose yourself, and so in which you can find yourself.
Anne Lamott
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So a moral position is not a message. A moral position is a passionate caring inside you.
Anne Lamott
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I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won't have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they're doing it.
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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Most human beings are dedicated to keeping that one door shut. But the writer's job is to see what's behind it, to see the bleak unspeakable stuff, and to turn the unspeakable into words — not just into any words but if we can, into rhythm and blues.
Anne Lamott
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Having a baby is like suddenly getting the world's worst roommate, like having Janis Joplin with a bad hangover and PMS come to stay with you.
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.
Anne Lamott
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Quote of the day
The true spirit of conversation consists in building on another man's observation, not overturning it.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Anne Lamott
Born:
April 10, 1954
(age 70)
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