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df98de1
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Late Fragment And did you get what you wanted from this life even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth. RAYMOND CARVER
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Anne Lamott |
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263138d
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When Sam was six or so, he explained to me why we call God "God": "Because when you see something so great, you just go, 'God!" --
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Anne Lamott |
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41a2a4e
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The trees are so huge that they shut you up.
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Anne Lamott |
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8ea4825
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When I asked Father Tom where we find God in this present darkness, he said that God is in creation, and to get outdoors as much as you can.
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darkness
god
outdoors
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Anne Lamott |
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42a578b
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I read a wonderful passage in an interview with Carolyn Chute, the author of The Beans of Egypt, Maine, who was discussing rewriting: "I feel like a lot of time my writing is like having about twenty boxes of Christmas decorations. But no tree. You're going, Where do I put this? Then they go, Okay, you can have a tree, but we'll blindfold you and you gotta cut it down with a spoon." This is how I've arrived at my plots a number of times. I ..
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Anne Lamott |
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63b842b
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When you are on the knife's edge--when nobody knows exactly what is going to happen next, only that it will be worse--you take in today.
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Anne Lamott |
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ca17bbf
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We kept on cooking and walking the dog, taking the kids to the park, cleaning the kitchen, and letting Sara and Adam hate what was going on when they needed to. Sometimes we let them resist finding any meaning or solace in anything that had to do with their daughter's diagnosis, and this was one of the hardest things to do -- to stop trying to make things come out better than they were. We let them spew when they needed to; we offered the g..
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grief
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Anne Lamott |
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4ba1abe
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Plot grows out of character. If you focus on who the people in your story are, if you sit and write about two people you know and are getting to know better day by day, something is bound to happen. Characters should not, conversely, serve as pawns for some plot you've dreamed up. Any plot you impose on your characters will be onomatopoetic: PLOT.
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Anne Lamott |
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bba7a3c
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The whole game in the fifties and early sixties was for no one to know who you really were. We children were witness to the total pretense of how our parents wanted the world to see them. We helped them maintain this image, because if anyone outside the family could see who they really were deep down, the whole system, the ship of your family, might sink. We held our breath to give the ship buoyancy. We were little air tanks.
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Anne Lamott |
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156bc9b
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The redwoods are like organ pipes, playing silent chords.
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Anne Lamott |
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ef98f25
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And because she did not shove this down my throat, this dawned on me.
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Anne Lamott |
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8926694
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it may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.
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Anne Lamott |
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3a904fd
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There's freedom in hitting bottom
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Anne Lamott |
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4ad2a2d
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Also, I have a pouch below my belly, whereas I'd always had a thin waist before. Now there's this situation down there, low and grabbable. If it had a zipper, you could store stuff in there, like a fanny pack.
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Anne Lamott |
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4efb82f
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in order to be a writer, you have to learn to be reverent.
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Anne Lamott |
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b3676d2
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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 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 in the past few days, it is hard not to be humbled, and pleased to give back. Most
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Anne Lamott |
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e687183
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If it is someone else's problem, you probably don't have the solution.
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Anne Lamott |
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db817b3
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The medieval German mystic Meister Eckhart said that if the soul could have known God without the world, God never would have created the world.
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Anne Lamott |
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862cdac
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The Amen is only as good as the attitude. If you are trying to finish up quickly so you can check your cell phone messages, you are missing the chance to spend quiet moments with the giver of life and the eternal, which means you may reap continued feelings of life racing along without you. So as Samuel Beckett admonished us to fail again, and fail better, we try to pray again, and pray better, for slightly longer and with slightly more hon..
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prayer
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Anne Lamott |
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a09c8d2
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The good news is that if you don't seal up your heart with caulking compound, and instead stay permeable, people stay alive inside you, and maybe outside you, too, forever. This
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Anne Lamott |
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74c083f
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In May 1992, I went to Ixtapa with my son, Sam, who was then two and a half. At the time, my best friend of twenty years, named Pammy, had been battling breast cancer for two years. I also had a boyfriend with whom I spoke two or three times a day, whom I loved and who loved me. Then, in early November of that year, the big eraser came down and got Pammy, and it also got the boyfriend, from whom I parted by mutual agreement. The grief was h..
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Anne Lamott |
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586a081
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They taught me to pay attention, but not so much attention to my tiny princess mind.
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Anne Lamott |
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52a6d19
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It's like bitch-slapping E.T.
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Anne Lamott |
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566fc9d
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We who are your closest friends feel the time has come to tell you that every Thursday we have been meeting, as a group, to devise ways to keep you in perpetual uncertainty frustration discontent and torture by neither loving you as much as you want nor cutting you adrift. Your analyst is in on it, plus your boyfriend and your ex-husband; and we have pledged to disappoint you as long as you need us. In announcing our association we realize ..
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Anne Lamott |
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ac44f92
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In paintings, music, poetry, architecture, we feel the elusive energy that moves through us and the air and the ground all the time, that usually disperses and turns chaotic in our busy-ness and distractedness and moodiness. Artists channel it, corral it, make it visible to the rest of us. The best works of art are like semaphores of our experience, signaling what we didn't know was true but do now.
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poetry
music
life-philosophy
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Anne Lamott |
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e6a2abe
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You've heard it said that when all else fails, follow instructions. So we breathe, try to slow down and pay attention, try to love and help God's other children, and - hardest of all, at least to me - learn to love our depressing, hilarious, mostly decent selves. We get thirsty people water, read to the very young and old, and listen to the sad. We pick up litter and try to leave the world a slightly better place for our stay here. Those ar..
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Anne Lamott |
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945c839
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Jesus is busy with his own stuff, and is not going to get involved in your little tug-of-war. Plus, don't forget, he has his own mother to deal with. She's all he can handle, as far as mothers go.
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family
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Anne Lamott |
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5244792
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It's always the same old problem: how to find ourselves in the great yammering of ego and tragedy and discomfort and obsession with everyone else's destinies.
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Anne Lamott |
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6394fe3
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I started to cry then, and I cried for a long time without making much noise. I cried and cried like a little kid.
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Anne Lamott |
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f9c2938
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Everyone was on God's payroll, whether they knew it or not.
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Anne Lamott |
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796fa85
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I told myself that historically when people do too well too quickly, they are a Greek tragedy waiting to happen.
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Anne Lamott |
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e86516d
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She wants to have hiked; I want to have had dessert.
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Anne Lamott |
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d2b1531
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My father treated them with respect and kindness, his main philosophical and spiritual position being: Don't be an asshole.
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Anne Lamott |
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bba631a
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You want to avoid at all costs drawing your characters on those that already exist in other works of fiction. You must learn about people from people, not from what you read. Your reading should confirm what you've observed in the world.
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reading
writing
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Anne Lamott |
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2f9de01
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God has smiled on me, He has set me free." For us to acknowledge that we have been set free from toxic dependency, from crippling obsession or guilt, that we have been graced with the ability finally to forgive someone, is just plain astonishing."
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Anne Lamott |
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e4cf642
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the insidious palace lie that we will get over crushing losses means that our emotional GPS can never find true north, as it is based on maps that no longer mention the most important places we have been to.
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Anne Lamott |
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2a823c5
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Grace means suddenly you're in a different universe from the one where you were stuck, and there was absolutely no way for you to get there on your own.
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Anne Lamott |
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dae8d46
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It can be too sad here. We so often lose our way. It is easy to sense and embrace meaning when life is on track. When there is a feeling of fullness--having love, goodness, family, work, maybe God as parts of life--it's easier to navigate around the sadness that you inevitably stumble across. Life holds beauty, magic and anguish. Sometimes sorrow is unavoidable, even when your kids are little, when the marvels of your children, and your par..
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Anne Lamott |
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bceec9b
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Now, practically even better news than that of short assignments is the idea of shitty first drafts. All good writers write them.
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writer
writing
first-drafts
author
write
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Anne Lamott |
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9390611
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Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen our sense of life: they feed the soul. 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.
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Anne Lamott |
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08471e3
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anyone who survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life.
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Anne Lamott |
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43311a4
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For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.
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writer
writing
the-writing-process
writing-advice
write
on-writing
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Anne Lamott |
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6bfb801
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When we are stunned to the place beyond words, we're finally starting to get somewhere. It is so much more comfortable to think that we know what it all means, what to expect and how it all hangs together. When we are stunned to the place beyond words, when an aspect of life takes us away from being able to chip away at something until it's down to a manageable size and then to file it nicely away, when all we can say in response is "Wow," ..
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Anne Lamott |
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7c06854
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There really is only today, although luckily that is also the eternal now.
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Anne Lamott |