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e577969
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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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Anne Lamott |
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c3e8ce8
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Her message was always the same: God loved the world, all evidence to the contrary, and we must not give up on God.
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Anne Lamott |
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1decd80
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My son, Sam, at three and a half, had these keys to a set of plastic handcuffs, and one morning he intentionally locked himself out of the house. I was sitting on the couch reading the newspaper when I heard him stick his plastic keys into the doorknob and try to open the door. Then I heard him say, "Oh, shit." My whole face widened, like the guy in Edvard Munch's Scream. After a moment I got up and opened the front door. "Honey," I said, "..
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Anne Lamott |
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fa04991
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do you still believe that I am the Resurrection and the Life? Even when you don't get what you want? Even when nothing makes sense?
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Anne Lamott |
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88336f5
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Teaching] was hard. Some of the kids were needy and vulnerable and depressed, with faces of dubious, aged concern, rumpled foreheads, downcast or shuttered eyes. Some were wild. We did not exclude anyone, because Jesus didn't. On bad days, I could not imagine what he had been thinking. I could always feel Jesus in the room, encouraging us in every way, although maybe he would have stopped short of sharing Doritos with us.
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Anne Lamott |
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3a70417
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Writing involves seeing people suffer and, as Robert Stone once put it, finding some meaning therein.
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Anne Lamott |
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805fc4e
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The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.
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Anne Lamott |
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cc673d3
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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 is going to have to be its own reward. There is no cosmic importance to your getting something published, but there is in learning to be a giver.
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Anne Lamott |
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957abea
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The good news is that God has such low standards, and reaches out to those of us who are often not lovable and offers us a chance to come back in from the storm of drama and toxic thoughts.
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Anne Lamott |
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fcf9c8d
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must have been a book--way down there in the slush pile of manuscripts--that somehow slipped out of the final draft of the Bible. That would have been the chapter that dealt with how we're supposed to recover from the criticism session in the Garden, and discover a sense that we're still welcome on the planet. There are moments in Scripture when we hear that God delights in people, and I am incredulous. But they are few and far between. Per..
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Anne Lamott |
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74bc7ad
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This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense of--please forgive me--wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small, bordered worlds.
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Anne Lamott |
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9df3515
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Maybe it's because music is about as physical as it gets: your essential rhythm is your heartbeat; your essential sound, your breath. We're walking temples of noise, and when you add tender hearts to this mix, it somehow lets us meet in places we couldn't get to any other way.
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Anne Lamott |
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a87d945
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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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7513b06
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Think of a fine painter attempting to capture an inner vision, beginning with one corner of the canvas, painting what he thinks should be there, not quite pulling it off, covering it over with white paint, and trying again, each time finding out what his painting isn't, until finally he finds out what it is.
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Anne Lamott |
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3803ec4
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To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass--seeing things in such a narrow and darkly narcissistic way that it presents a colo-rectal theology, offering hope to no one.
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Anne Lamott |
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e352a49
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I stared at the little white agates in my hand, delicate as moon drops. The mystery of God's love as I understand it is that God loves the man who was being mean to his dog just as much as he loves babies; God loves Susan Smith, who drowned her two sons, as much as he loves Desmond Tutu. And he loved her just as much when she was releasing the handbrake of her car that sent her boys into the river as he did when she first nursed them. So of..
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love
god-s-love
mystery
knowledge
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Anne Lamott |
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083f643
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I tell you, families are definitely the training ground for forgiveness.
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forgiveness
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Anne Lamott |
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33e4a6e
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Spring is sweet, the baby season; summer is the teenage season -- too much energy, too much growth and beauty and heat and late nights, none of them what they are cracked up to be. Fall is the older season, a more seasoned season. The weather surrounds you instead of beating down on you.
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Anne Lamott |
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144627e
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Jesus said that whatever you did to the least of his people, you did to him, and the lifers in penitentiaries are the leastest people in this country. Just look to see whose budgets are being cut these days -- the old, the crazies, the children in Head Start -- and that's where Jesus will be.
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Anne Lamott |
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9a6790a
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all of the great writers drank, except for Kafka and Nietzsche, neither of whom you exactly wanted to be when you grew up.
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Anne Lamott |
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8c986dc
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I rest in silence and music and long strides, while Sam rests in noise and motion.
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Anne Lamott |
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5ea0808
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We said that we believed that the truth would set us free, and the truth was that the Sunday-school staff was burned out, that there were almost no people of color, and that if we didn't get more help, we'd have to close down.
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Anne Lamott |
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25602d0
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Even as we improved as teachers and as students, the children continued to have raging impulse-control problems; the very thing that made them spontaneous and immediate could also make them mean...The other teachers and I had dreamed of taking the kids on field trips, to remove them from the grip and tangle of life -- of a day on the beach; of sandy, sacramental hot dogs; of playing in the ocean, making sculptures, and drawing with sticks. ..
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Anne Lamott |
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d33637b
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This is parenting on steroids.
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Anne Lamott |
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e3c718b
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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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263b086
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We're individuals in time and space who are often gravely lost, and then miraculously, in art, found.
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Anne Lamott |
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160a088
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I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won't have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they're doing it.
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Anne Lamott |
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30a8bb4
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Beauty is a miracle of things going together imperfectly.
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Anne Lamott |
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b2efd6a
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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.
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Anne Lamott |
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6d4e7d6
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love Wendell Berry's lines that "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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6e6d846
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This is all that restoration requires most of the time, that one person not give up.
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Anne Lamott |
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543b447
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day by day you have to give the work before you all the best stuff you have, not saving up for later projects. If you give freely, there will always be more.
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Anne Lamott |
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22b93b6
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I suddenly have two stomachs--a regular tummy and another one below that, which I call the subcontinent. This older body is both amazingly healthy and a big disappointment.
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Anne Lamott |
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01bd1e9
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were going to begin practicing the presence of God for the first time today, it would help to begin by admitting the three most terrible truths of our existence: that we are so ruined, and so loved, and in charge of so little.
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Anne Lamott |
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9b483ee
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The movement of grace toward gratitude brings us from the package of self-obsessed madness to a spiritual awakening. Gratitude is peace.
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Anne Lamott |
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cfc2539
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for a life oriented to leisure is in the end a life oriented to death--the greatest leisure of all.
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Anne Lamott |
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b384e54
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clutter and mess show us that life is being lived.
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Anne Lamott |
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e3cb5a0
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One writer I know tells me that he sits down every morning and says to himself nicely, "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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bd4f3eb
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Prayer is talking to something or anything with which we seek union, even if we are bitter or insane or broken.
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Anne Lamott |
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0ca977a
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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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6ea799e
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Even mushrooms respond to light--I suppose they blink their mushroomy little eyes, like the rest of us.
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Anne Lamott |
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2887c5b
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It gets darker and darker, and then Jesus is born." That line came back to me, from out of nowhere, and I decided to practice radical hope, hope in the face of not having a clue."
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jesus
hope
line
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Anne Lamott |
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45d845d
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One of the immutable laws of being human is that the people who show up are the right people.
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people
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Anne Lamott |
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a22808a
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Only God can put Scripture inside. But reading sacred text can put it on your hearts, and then when your hearts break, the holy words will fall inside.
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heart
text
word
scripture
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Anne Lamott |