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d9c5bc6
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Jealousy has always been my cross, the weakness and woundedness in me that has most often caused me to feel ugly and unlovable, like the Bad Seed.
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Anne Lamott |
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8b77eab
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I think we're all pretty crazy on this bus. I'm not sure I know anyone who's got all the dots on his or her dice.
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Anne Lamott |
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a5ba671
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one thing about having a baby is that each step of the way you simply cannot imagine loving him any more than you already do, because you are bursting with love, loving as much as you are humanly capable of- and then you do, you love him even more.
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Anne Lamott |
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c474ba9
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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 numbness, silence.
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Anne Lamott |
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2f6bd59
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We cheated, you and me, and someone noticed. I noticed you; someone else noticed me. It hurts us. That's not so bad. So many people cheat. Everywhere on every level. Everyone's cheated. I'm just saying that you don't need to see yourself as a cheater. Because that's not who you are. You're someone who cheated. There's a difference, and you should try to get that difference, or that's who you'll grow up to be.
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Anne Lamott |
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8071b94
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I'm probably just as good a mother as the next repressed, obsessive-compulsive paranoiac.
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Anne Lamott |
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f70e0da
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Age has given me what I was looking for my entire life - it has given me . It has provided time and experience and failures and triumphs and time-tested friends who have helped me step into the shape that was waiting for me. I fit into me now. I have an organic life, finally, not necessarily the one people imagined for me, or tried to get me to have. I have the life I longed for. I have become the woman I hardly dared imagine I would be.
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life
maturing
getting-older
contentment
experience
aging
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Anne Lamott |
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4b3f995
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I remember staring at my son endlessly when he was an infant, stunned by his very existence, wondering where on earth he had come from.
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Anne Lamott |
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fdbec03
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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. The writer's job is to turn the unspeakable into words - not just into any words, but if we can, into rhythm and blues.
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Anne Lamott |
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6511683
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Are you born again?" he asked, as we taxied down the runway. He was rather prim and tense, maybe a little like David Eisenhower with a spastic colon. I did not know how to answer for a moment. "Yes," I said. "I am."
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life
inspirational
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Anne LaMott |
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92cb2ff
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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.
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Anne Lamott |
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ecf2ed1
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God sent Jesus to join the human experience, which means to make a lot of mistakes. Jesus didn't arrive here knowing how to walk. He had fingers and toes, confusion, sexual feelings, crazy human internal processes. He had the same prejudices as the rest of his tribe: he had to learn that the Canaanite woman was a person. He had to suffer the hardships and tedium and setbacks of being a regular person. If he hadn't the incarnation would mean..
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Anne Lamott |
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1f63e9f
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Writing is about hypnotizing yourself into believing in yourself, getting some work done, then unhypnotizing yourself and going over the material coldly.
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Anne Lamott |
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a1a63d8
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Love falls to earth, rises from the ground, pools around the afflicted. Love pulls people back to their feet. Bodies and souls are fed. Bones and lives heal. New blades of grass grow from charred soil. The sun rises.
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Anne Lamott |
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6a1102b
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Try to write in a directly emotional way, instead of being too subtle or oblique. Don't be afraid of your material or your past. Be afraid of wasting any more time obsessing about how you look and how people see you. Be afraid of not getting your writing done.
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Anne Lamott |
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d5d0e2b
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This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won't wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be.
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Anne Lamott |
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78f9469
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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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writing-craft
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Anne Lamott |
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5a7fb6d
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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.
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Anne Lamott |
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2c7265a
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the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day. [pp. 65-66]
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sanity
nuts
tribe
insane
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Anne Lamott |
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975d755
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But you are not your bank account, or your ambition. You're not the cold clay lump you leave behind when you die. You're not your collection of walking personality disorders. You are Spirit, you are love, and even though it is hard to believe sometimes, you are free. You're here to love, and be loved, freely. If you find out next week that you are terminally ill - and we're all terminally ill on this bus - what will matter are memories of b..
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freedom
life
love
you
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Anne Lamott |
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3d5abbb
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It is hard to remember that you are a cherished spiritual being when you're burping up apple fritters and Cheetos.
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spiritual
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Anne Lamott |
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88e531f
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There is nothing more touching to me then a family picture where everyone is trying to look his or her best, but you can see what a mess they all really are.
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Anne Lamott |
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4d2a8c2
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I think that is why we stay close to our families, no matter how neurotic the members, how deeply annoying or dull- because when people have seen you at your worst, you don't have to put on the mask as much.
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Anne Lamott |
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8b1eab0
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one of the worst things about being a parent, for me, is the self-discovery, the being face to face with one's secret insanity and brokenness and rage.
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Anne Lamott |
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c461c35
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This is the most profound spiritual truth I know: that even when we're most sure that love can't conquer all, it seems to anyway. It goes down into the rat hole with us, in the guise of our friends, and there it swells and comforts. It gives us second winds, third winds, hundredth winds.
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love
love-conquers
second-wind
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Anne Lamott |
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d832526
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She felt as if the mosaic she had been assembling out of life's little shards got dumped to the ground, and there was no way to put it back together.
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shards
mosaic
shattered
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Anne Lamott |
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b2acf9f
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A nun I know once told me she kept begging God to take her character defects away from her. After years of this prayer, God finally got back to her: I'm not going to take anything away from you, you have to give it to Me.
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prayer
character
god
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Anne Lamott |
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a4a9abb
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If we stay where we are, where we're stuck, where we're comfortable and safe, we die there... When nothing new can get in, that's death.
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prayer
death
comfort-zone
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Anne Lamott |
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44fca76
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It is a violation of trust to use your kids as caulking for the cracks in you.
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Anne Lamott |
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b3538af
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And my fear of failure has been lifelong and deep. If you are what you do- and I think my parents may have accidentally given me this idea- and you do poorly, what then? It's over; you're wiped out. All those prophecies you heard in the dark have come true, and people can see the real you, see what a schmendrick you are, what a fraud.
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Anne Lamott |
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e79228e
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And as it turns out, if one person is praying for you, buckle up. Things can happen.
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Anne Lamott |
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ca80ba2
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After a while the middle-aged person who lives in her head begins to talk to her soul, the kid.
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Anne Lamott |
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c82193b
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Now she and I sit together in her room and eat chocolate, and I tell her that in a very long time when we both to go heaven, we should try to get chairs next to each other, close to the dessert table.
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heaven
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Anne Lamott |
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c73de25
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He told me about his monster. His sounded just like mine without quite so much mascara. When people shine a little light on their monster, we find out how similar most of our monsters are.
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Anne Lamott |
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2d363a7
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I think that something similar happens with our psychic muscles. They cramp around our wounds -- the pain from our childhood, the losses and disappointments of adulthood, the humiliations suffered in both -- to keep us from getting hurt in the same place again, to keep foreign substances out. So those wounds never have a chance to heal. Perfectionism is one way our muscles cramp. In some cases we don't even know that the wounds and the cram..
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Anne Lamott |
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4eefde2
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When you make friends with fear, it can't rule you.
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Anne Lamott |
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464dc18
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Oh my God, what if you wake up some day, and you're 65, or 75, and you never got your memoir or novel written; or you didn't go swimming in warm pools and oceans all those years because your thighs were jiggly and you had a nice big comfortable tummy; or you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life, of imagination and radical silliness and staring off into space like when..
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perfectionism
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Anne Lamott |
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abf11c0
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I just gave up one day. Around the time the news about toxic shock came out. I thought, Fuck me, man, I give up. Come and get me.
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giving-up
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Anne Lamott |
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5b6b6e6
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Some people have a thick skin and you don't. Your heart is really open and that is going to cause pain, but that is an appropriate response to this world.
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pain
life
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Anne Lamott |
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5ef223a
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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. It means that you are willing to stop being such a jerk. When you are aware of all that has been given to you, in your lifetime and the past few days, it is hard not to be humbled, and pleased to give back.
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gratitude
joy
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Anne Lamott |
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7bdd965
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Why couldn't Jesus command us to obsess over everything, to try to control and manipulate people, to try not to breathe at all, or to pay attention, stomp away to brood when people annoy us, and then eat a big bag of Hershey's Kisses in bed?
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jesus
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Anne Lamott |
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e3e1f47
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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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Anne Lamott |
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9142a1f
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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.
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Anne Lamott |
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c829f0f
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You don't want to spend your time around people who make you hold your breath. You can't fill up when you're holding your breath. And writing is about filling up, filling up when you are empty, letting images and ideas and smells run down like water - just as writing is also about dealing with the emptiness.
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Anne Lamott |