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See how the fearful chandelier Trembles above you Each time you open your mouth To sing. Sing. --DONALD JUSTICE
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rejoice
sing
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Anne Lamott |
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Sin is not the adult bookstore on the corner. It is the hard heart, the lack of generosity, and all the isms, racism and sexism and so forth. But is there a crack where a ribbon of light might get in, might sneak past all the roadblocks and piles of stones, mental and emotional and cultural? We
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Anne Lamott |
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A big heart is both a clunky and a delicate thing; it doesn't protect itself and it doesn't hide.
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Anne Lamott |
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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.
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Anne Lamott |
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Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up. I
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Anne Lamott |
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She walked to the front door. 'Hello?' 'Hello,' a woman's voice said. 'Are you a Witness?' 'I swear to God I didn't see a thing.
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Anne Lamott |
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perfectionism will ruin your writing, blocking inventiveness and playfulness and life force
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Anne Lamott |
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Gratitude is peace.
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Anne Lamott |
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Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious.
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Anne Lamott |
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They kind of want to write, but they really want to be published. You'll never get to where you want to be that way, I tell them.
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Anne Lamott |
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Very few writers really know what they are doing until they've done it.
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Anne Lamott |
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you can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.)
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Anne Lamott |
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writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
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Anne Lamott |
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It's not like you don't have a choice, because you do--you can either type or kill yourself.
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Anne Lamott |
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Don't look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.
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Anne Lamott |
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However, in the meantime, we are going to concentrate on writing itself, on how to become a better writer, because, for one thing, becoming a better writer is going to help you become a better reader, and that is the real payoff.
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Anne Lamott |
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And I'd stand there trying to see it, the way you try to remember a dream, where you squint and it's right there on the tip of your psychic tongue but you can't get it back. The image is gone. That is one of the worst feelings I can think of, to have had a wonderful moment or insight or vision or phrase, to know you had it, and then to lose it.
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Anne Lamott |
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various people at her church kept saying that she could be happy because she was going home to be with Jesus. This is the sort 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.
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Anne Lamott |
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grace can be the experience of a second wind, when even though what you want is clarity and resolution, what you get is stamina and poignancy and the strength to hang on.
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Anne Lamott |
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We're bugs struggling in the river, brightly visible to the trout below.
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Anne Lamott |
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Vonnegut said, "When I write, I feel like an armless legless man with a crayon in his mouth."
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Anne Lamott |
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You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your unconscious to kick in for you creatively.
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Anne Lamott |
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Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist's true friend.
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Anne Lamott |
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We live stitch by stitch, when we're lucky. If you fixate on the big picture, the whole shebang, the overview, you miss the stitching.
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Anne Lamott |
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I understood immediately the thrill of seeing oneself in print. It provides some sort of primal verification: you are in print; therefore you exist.
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Anne Lamott |
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Most of us have done fairly well in our lives. We learned how to run on that one wheel, but now we want a refund.
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Anne Lamott |
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Vonnegut said, "When I write, I feel like an armless legless man with a crayon in his mouth." So"
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Anne Lamott |
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good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep
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Anne Lamott |
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that the dream must be vivid and continuous.
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Anne Lamott |
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Writer's block is going to happen to you. You will read what little you've written lately and see with absolute clarity that it is total dog shit.
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Anne Lamott |
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But where do we even start on the daily walk of restoration and awakening? We start where we are.
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Anne Lamott |
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You begin to cry and writhe and yell and then to keep on crying; and finally, grief ends up giving you the two best gifts: softness and illumination. Every
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Anne Lamott |
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For instance, I used to think that paired opposites were a given, that love was the opposite of hate, right the opposite of wrong. But now I think we sometimes buy into these concepts because it is so much easier to embrace absolutes than to suffer reality. I don't think anything is the opposite of love. Reality is unforgivingly complex.
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Anne Lamott |
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New is life.
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Anne Lamott |
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Believing isn't the hard part; waiting on God is. So I stuck with it and prayed impatiently for patience, and to stop feeling disgusted by myself, and to believe for a few moments that God, just a bit busy with other suffering in the world, actually cared about one menopausal white woman on a binge.
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Anne Lamott |
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You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard. So
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Anne Lamott |
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As far as I can recall, none of the adults in my life ever once remembered to say, "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. The cost is high, but the blessing of being compassionate is beyond your wildest dreams. However, you're not going to feel that a lot in seventh grade. Just hang on." I"
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Anne Lamott |
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had to learn to be present without paying quite so much attention to my poor old overamped mind, because this was the source of most of my unhappiness. And it still is. The
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Anne Lamott |
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I quit my last real job, as a writer at a magazine, when I was twenty-one. That was the moment when I lost my place of prestige on the fast track, and slowly, millimeter by millimeter, I started to get found, to discover who I had been born to be, instead of the impossibly small package, all tied up tightly in myself, that I had agreed to be. That
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Anne Lamott |
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One of the hardest lessons I had to learn was that I was going to need a lot of help, and for a long time. (Even this morning.) What saved me was that I found gentle, loyal and hilarious companions, which is at the heart of meaning: maybe we don't find a lot of answers to life's tougher questions, but if we find a few true friends, that's even better.
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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 has to be its own reward.
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Anne Lamott |
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Thanks' is a huge mind-shift, from thinking that God wants our happy chatter and a public demonstration and is deeply interested in our opinions of the people we hate, to feeling quiet gratitude, humbly and amazingly, without shame at having been so blessed.
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Anne Lamott |
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Who knows how much of our stories are true?
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Anne Lamott |
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It may be one of those miracles where your heart sinks, because you think it means you have lost. But in surrender you have won. And if it were me, after a moment, I would say, Thanks.
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Anne Lamott |