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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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Don't get me wrong: grief sucks, it really does. Unfortunately, though, avoiding it robs us of life, of the now, of a sense of living spirit.
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Anne Lamott |
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Mercy means compassion, empathy, a heart for someone's troubles. It's not something you do - it is something in you, accessed, revealed, or cultivated through use, like a muscle. We find it in the most unlikely places, never where we first look.
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Anne Lamott |
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grace is a small white butterfly, and life is a semi trailer careening up 101.
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life
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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 nest and say, "This is my niche, this is where I live now, this is where I belong." And the niche may be small and dark, but at last you will finally know what you are doing. After thirty years or more of floundering around and screwing up, you will finally know, and when you get serious you will..
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Anne Lamott |
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If you find that you start a number of stories or pieces that you don't ever bother finishing, that you lose interest or faith in them along the way, it may be that there is nothing at their center about which you care passionately.
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Anne Lamott |
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Robert Burns said it best: "Life is but a day at most." --
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Anne Lamott |
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we do endure, and that out of the wreckage something surprising will rise.
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Anne Lamott |
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they seemed to read all the papers the school sent home, which I think is actually a little show-offy.
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Anne Lamott |
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And if minor characters show an inclination to become major characters ... you at least give them a shot at it, because ... just as in the real world it may take you many years to find out that the stranger you talked to once for half an hour in the railroad station may have done more to point you to where your true homeland lies than your priest or your best friend or even your psychiatrist.
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writing
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Anne Lamott |
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wish there'd been a shortcut, but the wound
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Anne Lamott |
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every single one of us at birth is given an emotional acre all our own.
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Anne Lamott |
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Now, you also want to ask yourself how they stand, what they carry in their pockets or purses, what happens in their faces and to their posture when they are thinking, or bored, or afraid. Whom would they have voted for last time? Why should we care about them anyway? What would be the first thing they stopped doing if they found out they had six months to live? Would they start smoking again? Would they keep flossing? You
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Anne Lamott |
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In general, though, there's no point in writing hopeless novels. We all know we're going to die; what's important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this. Sometimes
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Anne Lamott |
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c84c38b
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SHORE AND GROUND Keep walking, though there's no place to get to. Don't try to see through the distances. That's not for human beings. Move within, but don't move the way fear makes you move. Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened. Don't open the door to the study and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument. Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground. RUMI
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Anne Lamott |
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clarity of vision--especially
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Anne Lamott |
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The challenge and the dignity make it interesting enough. Besides,
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Anne Lamott |
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In biblical times, they used to stone a few thirteen-year-olds with some regularity, which helped keep the others quiet and at home. The mothers were usually in the first row of stone throwers, and had to be restrained.
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teenagers
parenthood
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Anne Lamott |
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Who knows, maybe those two rogue leaders, Gandhi and Jesus, were right--a loving response changes the people who would beat the shit out of you, including yourself, of course. Their way, of the heart, makes everything bigger. Decency and goodness are subversively folded into the craziness, like caramel ribbons into ice cream. Otherwise, it's about me, and my bile ducts, and how unique I am and how I've suffered. And that is what hell is lik..
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Anne Lamott |
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Writing is about learning to pay attention and to communicate what is going on. Now, if you ask me, what's going on is that we're all up to here in it, and probably the most important thing is that we not yell at one another.
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Anne Lamott |
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a subterranean murmur. It may sound like one of the many separate voices that make up the sounds of a creek. Or it may come in code, oblique and sneaky, creeping in from around the corner.
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Anne Lamott |
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I heard a preacher say recently that hope is a revolutionary patience; let me add that so is being a writer.
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Anne Lamott |
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I have gotten lost all of my life, maybe more than most, and been found every time.
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Anne Lamott |
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whatever you use to keep the pain at bay robs you of the flecks and nuggets of gold that feeling grief will give you.
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Anne Lamott |
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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. The sky had shifted
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Anne Lamott |
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I don't know Who--or what--put the question, I don't know when it was put. I don't even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone--or Something--and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal. --DAG HAMMARSKJOLD, Markings
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Anne Lamott |
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I let my mind wander.
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Anne Lamott |
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I know a person with a Ph.D. who goes to a church based on Star Wars: May the force be with you.
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Anne Lamott |
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inventiveness and playfulness and life force (these are words we are allowed to use in California).
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Anne Lamott |
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You stop pretending life is such fin or makes sense. It's often messy and cruel and dull, and we do the best we can. It's unfair, and jerks seem to win. But you fall in love with a few people.
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Anne Lamott |
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Trappings and charm wear off, I've learned. The book of welcome says, Let people see you. They see that your upper arms are beautiful, soft and clean and warm, and then they will see this about their own, some of the time. It's called having friends, choosing each other, getting found, being fished out of the rubble. It blows you away, how this wonderful event happened--me in your life, you in mine.
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Anne Lamott |
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Look, if you don't have a bad attitude and lots of things wrong with you, no serious person is going to be interested. If you feel scared, outraged, confused most of the time, come on over. Have a seat.
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Anne Lamott |
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God loves you crazily, like I love you, Rae said, like a slightly overweight auntie, who sees only your marvelousness and need.
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Anne Lamott |
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Do you think that we're wired this way? With the devil inside?" "Yeah, in the same way we're wired for God. But not to the same extent."
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Anne Lamott |
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W]hen you're dreaming, you're not the one calling the shots. So it's a reprieve.
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Anne Lamott |
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His art springs out of bubbling underground necessity, as if he's somehow dipping himself into the river that gave him life; he's making dream material visible.
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creativity
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Anne Lamott |
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Every sound is by definition a stop, which is how we can hear it.
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Anne Lamott |
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You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the rational mind.
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Anne Lamott |
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good dialogue encompasses both what is said and what is not said.
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Anne Lamott |
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Perfectionism is one way our muscles cramp. In some cases we don't even know that the wounds and the cramping are there, but both limit us. They keep us moving and writing in tight, worried ways.
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Anne Lamott |
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his cell phone--the adolescent's pacemaker.
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Anne Lamott |
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I don't think you have time to waste not writing because you are afraid you won't be good enough at it...
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Anne Lamott |
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Like the Buddha and Jesus, who knew they couldn't control our lives, but could infuse lives with their selves, we have been graced with a few people.
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Anne Lamott |
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Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don't worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent.
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Anne Lamott |