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affa170
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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, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft.
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Anne Lamott |
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503f09a
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sometimes when you need to feel the all-embracing nature of God, paradoxically you need to hang out in the ordinariness, in daily ritual and comfort.
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Anne Lamott |
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c47c1ae
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Most of us don't notice how great we look until years, even decades later. Not long ago, I was looking at photos of myself at various ages and weights--way before the neckular deterioration began, way before the fanny pack of menopause--and I could see how gorgeous I must have looked to everyone else.
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Anne Lamott |
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0f627c1
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Alone, we are doomed, but by the same token, we've learned that people are impossible, even the ones we love most--especially the ones we love most: they're damaged, prickly and set in their ways.
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Anne Lamott |
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f95e034
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The worst possible thing you can do when you're down in the dumps, tweaking, vaporous with victimized self-righteousness, or bored, is to take a walk with dying friends. They will ruin everything for you. First of all, friends like this may not even think of themselves as dying, although they clearly are, according to recent scans and gentle doctors' reports. But no, they see themselves as fully alive. They are living and doing as much as t..
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Anne Lamott |
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8277a28
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If you want to feel loving, I coached myself, do something loving. This is basic soul care.
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Anne Lamott |
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5f15088
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This kind of beauty softens you and expands you, which is good, but of course it makes you vulnerable to all sorts of horrible things, like, oh, feelings. And being in your body.
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music
vulnerability
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Anne Lamott |
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bf26c16
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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 nest and say, "This is my niche, this is where I live now, this is where I belong."
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Anne Lamott |
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0211ad4
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We learn from pain that some of the things we thought were castles turn out to be prisons, and we desperately want out, but even though we built them, we can't find the door. Yet maybe if you ask God for help in knowing which direction to face, you'll have a moment of intuition. Maybe you'll see at least one next right step you can take.
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pain
prayer
intuition
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Anne Lamott |
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56d8769
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If you screwed up and said out loud that you thought something scary was happening, grown-ups would say, "Oh, for Pete's sake--what an imagination." This is the best way to gaslight children. It keeps them under control, because if the parent is a mess, the children are doomed. It's best for the child to think he or she is the problem. Then there is toxic hope, which is better than no hope at all, that if the child can do better or need les..
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Anne Lamott |
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bc9a2c3
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Life on earth is a head-scratcher for anyone who's paying attention. This place has been a bad match for me since I was four.
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Anne Lamott |
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f5072f6
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They taught us that extending ourselves to others would help us stay sober and sane. But they also wanted us to extend ourselves to our own horrible selves, get ourselves a lovely cup of tea. It was and is the hardest work ever.
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Anne Lamott |
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55a9ae0
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How are we going to get through this craziness?" I asked. There was silence for a moment. "Left foot, right foot, left foot, breathe," he said."
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trouble
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Anne Lamott |
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7c23d8f
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Sue had been told that tumors had developed in her liver and lungs. She had been in a deep depression for a while, but she finally followed Barb's advice to call me after various people at her church kept saying that she could be happy - she was going home to be with Jesus. This is the type of thing that gives Christians a bad name. This, and the Inquisition. Sue wanted to open fire on them all. I think I encouraged this. Some of her evange..
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Anne Lamott |
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70579d5
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I watched him carefully. He was making art because he has to, and because he's brave enough to try and make contact, right there on the edge of madness, where he dreams.
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creativity
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Anne Lamott |
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0391b84
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I love ritual and repetition. Without them, I would be a balloon with a slow leak.
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Anne Lamott |
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aa720c2
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And my father, who never once in his life would have used the word 'nigger,' would smile and give an almost imperceptible laugh -- not a trace of rage on behalf of black people, not a trace of rage on behalf of me.
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Anne Lamott |
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db28d0b
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If you don't believe in what you are saying, there is no point in your saying it. You might as well call it a day and go bowling.
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Anne Lamott |
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b3f3460
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Jesus is] saying that we could be aware of, filled with, and saved by the presence of holy beauty, rather than worship golden calves.
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worship
jesus
golden-calves
holy-beauty
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Anne Lamott |
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9879f47
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He had the time to hear, like a person who believed there was someone alive beneath the rubble of herself, who heard the soft sounds she could still make from the broken parts that had waited decades to be missed.
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Anne Lamott |
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2521779
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There are few experiences as depressing as that anxious barren state known as writer's block, where you sit staring at your blank page like a cadaver, feeling your mind congeal, feeling you talent run down your leg and into your sock.
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writer
writing
writer-problems
writer-s-block
writes
write
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Anne Lamott |
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a255f19
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but you have to remind yourself that perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor.
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Anne Lamott |
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642b588
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Jesus had an affinity for prisoners. He had been one, after all. He must have often felt anxiety and isolation in jail, but He identified with the prisoners. He made a point of befriending the worst and most hated, because His message was that no one was beyond reach of divine love, despite society's way of stating the opposite. God, what a nut. Finally we stood outside an inner gate, showed our IDs to the guards, and got our hands stamped ..
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Anne Lamott |
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af81ce5
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When Sam's having a hard time and being a total baby about the whole thing, I feel so much frustration and rage and self-doubt and worry that it's like a mini-breakdown. I feel like my mind becomes a lake full of ugly fish and big clumps of algae and coral, of feelings and unhappy memories and rehearsals for future difficulties and failures. I paddle around in it like some crazy old dog, and then I remember that there's a float in the middl..
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Anne Lamott |
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79037a1
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hope, as Chesterton said, is the power of being cheerful in circumstances that we know to be desperate.
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Anne Lamott |
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7d6203f
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For some of us books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small flat rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world worlds that sing to you comfort and quiet or excite you.
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Anne Lamott |
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10b5191
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Grief, as I read somewhere once, is a lazy Susan. One day it is heavy and underwater, and the next day it spins and stops at loud and rageful, and the next day at wounded keening, and the next day at numbness, silence.
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Anne Lamott |
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921f0ba
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All that is holding us together [is] stories and compassion.
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Anne Lamott |
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2c25dd8
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Laughter is deliverance, bubbly salvation.
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Anne Lamott |
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b90bd21
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I decided to start from scratch, with a simple prayer: "Hi!" I said. Someone or something hears. I don't know much about its nature, only that when I cry out, it hears me and moves closer to me, and I don't feel so alone. I feel better. And I felt better that morning, starting over. No shame in that--Saint Augustine said that you have to start your relationship with God all over from the beginning, every day. Yesterday's faith does not wait..
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Anne Lamott |
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17d1104
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We have all we need to come through. Against all odds, no matter what we've lost, no matter what messes we've made over time, no matter how dark the night, we offer and are offered kindness, soul, light, and food, which create breath and spaciousness, which create hope, sufficient unto the day.
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Anne Lamott |
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2a836e4
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Look back on your life and find something small that made a big difference.
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small-moments
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Anne Lamott |
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ab024a2
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Prayer usually means praise, or surrender, acknowledging that you have run out of bullets.
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prayer
praise
surrender
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Anne Lamott |
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8bbf02a
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Underneath all things means that beneath the floorboards, in the depths, in the spaces between the pebbles or sandy floor that contain the pond, that hold our own inside person, is something that can't be destroyed, a foundation that keeps all the water from sinking back into the earth. Something is there, something we need, when we come to rest, when all is lost.
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need
lost
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Anne Lamott |
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78525dc
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I mean "God" as shorthand for the Good, for the animating energy of love; for Life, for the light that radiates from within people and from above; in the energies of nature, even in our rough, messy selves."
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Anne Lamott |
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a725537
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My understanding of incarnation is that we are not served by getting away from the grubbiness of suffering. Sometimes we feel that we are barely pulling ourselves forward through a tight tunnel on badly scraped-up elbows. But we do come out the other side, exhausted and changed.
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Anne Lamott |
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5d36df8
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I can teach them little things that may not be in any of the great books on writing. For instance, I'm not sure if anyone else has mentioned that December is traditionally a bad month for writing. It is a month of Mondays. Mondays are not good writing days. One has had all that freedom over the weekend, all that authenticity, all those dreamy dreams, and then your angry mute Slavic Uncle Monday arrives, and it is time to sit down at your de..
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Anne Lamott |
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9ba2036
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In the aftermath of loss, we do what we've always done, although we are changed, maybe more afraid. We do what we can, as well as we can. My pastor, Veronica, one Sunday told the story of a sparrow lying in the street with its legs straight up in the air, sweating a little under its feathery arms. A warhorse walks up to the bird and asks, "What on earth are you doing?" The sparrow replies, "I heard the sky was falling, and I wanted to help...
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Anne Lamott |
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1754aad
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Mercy is radical kindness. Mercy means offering or being offered aid in desperate straits. Mercy is not deserved. It involves absolving the unabsolvable, forgiving the unforgiveable.
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Anne Lamott |
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5679f13
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You have to be grateful whenever you get to someplace safe and okay, even if it turns out it wasn't quite where you were heading. The light you see when people are in the tunnel of deep trouble is domestic flashes of recognition and kitchen comforts, not Blake's radiance, which would be my preference.
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Anne Lamott |
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e687b72
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You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander.
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words
writing-life
writer
writing
imagination
writing-inspiration
sandcastles
writing-quotes
writing-philosophy
writing-craft
writing-advice
writing-process
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Anne Lamott |
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8ec9ded
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There's freedom in hitting bottom, in seeing that you won't be able to save or rescue your daughter, her spouse, his parents, or your career, relief in admitting you've reached the place of great unknowing. This is where restoration can begin, because when you're still in the state of trying to fix the unfixable, everything bad is engaged: the chatter of your mind, the tension of your physiology, all the trunks and wheel-ons you carry from ..
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Anne Lamott |
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28effcb
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One has to be done with the pretense of being just fine, unscarred, perfectly self-sufficient. No one is.
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Anne Lamott |
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22dba89
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I did not mean to be a Christian. I have been very clear about that. My first words upon encountering the presence of Jesus for the first time 12 years ago, were, I swear to God, "I would rather die." I really would have rather died at that point than to have my wonderful brilliant left-wing non-believer friends know that I had begun to love Jesus. I think they would have been less appalled if I had developed a close personal friendship wit..
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Anne Lamott |