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f703063
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Wonder takes our breath away, and makes room for new breath. That's why they call it breathtaking.
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Anne Lamott |
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a9fd798
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Her purse was a weight, ballast; it tethered her to the earth as her mind floated away.
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tragedy
parents
insanity
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Anne Lamott |
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3b9a5e0
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Astonishing material and revelation appear in our lives all the time. Let it be. Unto us, so much is given. We just have to be open for business.
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Anne Lamott |
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3cb2993
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I know nothing, except what everyone knows--if there when grace dances, I should dance.
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Anne Lamott |
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c6ed4ee
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We're Easter people, living in a Good Friday world.
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Anne Lamott |
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a1b86ab
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The best way to get quiet, other than the combination of extensive therapy, Prozac, and a lobotomy, is first to notice that the station is on. KFKD [K-Fucked] is on every single morning when I sit down at my desk. So I sit for a moment and then say a small prayer--please help me get out of the way so I can write what wants to be written. Sometimes ritual quiets the racket. Try it. Any number of things may work for you--an altar, for instanc..
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Anne Lamott |
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3d42bb5
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Addicts and alcoholics will tell you that their recovery began when they woke up in pitiful and degraded enough shape to take Step Zero, which is: "This shit has got to stop."
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Anne Lamott |
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f2e042c
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Getting found almost always means being lost for a while.
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Anne Lamott |
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788e191
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Being a writer guarantees that you will spend too much time alone -- and that as a result, your mind will begin to warp.
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Anne Lamott |
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32f44ba
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I 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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c983e34
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We can see Spirit made visible when people are kind to one another, especially when it's a really busy person, like you, taking care of a needy, annoying, neurotic person, like you.
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spirit
needs
self
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Anne Lamott |
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d479f5b
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Now. Maybe you think it is arrogant or self centered, or ridiculous for me to believe that God bothered to wiggle a cheap bolt out of my new used car because he or she needed to keep me away for a few days until just the moment when my old friend most needed me to help her mother move into whatever comes next. Maybe nothing conscious helped to stall me so that I would be there when I could be most useful. Or maybe it did. I'll never know fo..
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Anne Lamott |
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45e7c23
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All these people keep waxing sentimental about how fabulously well I am doing as a mother, how competent I am, but I feel inside like when you're first learning to put nail polish on your right hand with your left. You can do it, but it doesn't look all that great around the cuticles.
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Anne Lamott |
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ffbf778
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All these years I fell for the great palace lie that grief should be gotten over as quickly as possible and as privately. But what I've discovered since is that lifelong fear of grief keeps us in a barren, isolated place and that only grieving can heal grief; the passage of time will lessen the acuteness, but time alone, without the direct experience of grief, will not heal it.
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Anne Lamott |
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6bbe6ee
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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 are getting to know better every day, something is bound to happen.
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Anne Lamott |
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b6d1373
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A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way. It's a lie if you make something up. But you make it up in the name of the truth, and then you give your heart to expressing it clearly.
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writing
writers
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Anne Lamott |
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75f0074
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Having a great narrator is like having a great friend whose company you love, whose mind you love to pick, whose running commentary totally holds your attention, who makes you laugh out loud, whose lines you always want to steal. When you have a friend like this, she can say, "Hey, I've got to drive up to the dump in Petaluma--wanna come along?" and you honestly can't think of anything in the world you'd rather do."
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Anne Lamott |
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ad66fc7
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Periods in the wilderness or desert were not lost time. You might find life, wildflowers, fossils, sources of water. I wish there were shortcuts to wisdom and self-knowledge: cuter abysses or three-day spa wilderness experiences. Sadly, it doesn't work that way. I so resent this.
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Anne Lamott |
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9f4f5f7
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God can't clean the house of you when you're still in it.
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grace
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Anne Lamott |
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d735c88
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I know God enjoys hearing my take on how best we should all proceed, as I'm always full of useful advice. I'm sure God says either, "Oh, I so love Annie's selfless and evolved thoughts," or else "Jeez. What a head case."
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Anne Lamott |
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535d92f
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Dreadlocks make people wonder if you're trying to be rebellious.
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Anne Lamott |
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9b88492
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I was learning the secrets of life: that you could become the woman you'd dared to dream of being, but to do so you were going to have to fall in love with your own crazy, ruined self.
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Anne Lamott |
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88beaa6
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What can we say beyond Wow, in the presence of glorious art, in music so magnificent that it can't have originated solely on this side of things? Wonder takes our breath away, and makes room for new breath.
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Anne Lamott |
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9514861
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Novels ought to have hope; at least, American novels ought to have hope. French novels don't need to. We mostly win wars, they lose them. Of course, they did hide more Jews than many other countries, and this is a form of winning.
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Anne Lamott |
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a4c9818
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Here is the best true story on giving I know, and it was told by Jack Kornfield of the Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre. An eight-year-old boy had a younger sister who was dying of leukemia, and he was told that without a blood transfusion she would die. His parents explained to him that his blood was probably compatible with hers, and if so, he could be the blood donor. They asked him if they could test his blood. He said sure. So..
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Anne Lamott |
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afe0431
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I've always thought I could use my brain and my heart to jockey everyone around to the good. But life is not jockeyable. When you try, you make people infinitely crazier than they already were, including or especially yourself.
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Anne Lamott |
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dad01d9
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We were raised to believe in books, music, and nature.
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Anne Lamott |
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24d14ec
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Life does not seem to present itself to me for my convenience, to box itself up nicely so I can write about it with wisdom and a point to make before putting it on a shelf somewhere.
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Anne Lamott |
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c38b4d2
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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. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again.
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Anne Lamott |
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658210f
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And what do you do in the face of this powerlessness? As a parent?" "You get to be obsessed and angry," Tom said. "And they get to be the age they are, and act like teenagers if they want to. There is a zero-percent chance you will change them. So we breathe in, and out, talk to friends, as needed. We show up, wear clean underwear, say hello to strangers. We plant bulbs, and pick up litter, knowing there will be more in twenty minutes. We p..
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Anne Lamott |
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e33702c
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My parents, and librarians along the way, taught me about the space between words; about the margins, where so many juicy moments of life and spirit and friendship could be found. In a library, you could find miracles and truth and you might find something that would make you laugh so hard that you get shushed, in the friendliest way. There was sanctuary in a library, there is sanctuary now, from the war, from the storms of our family and o..
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libraries
exploration
sacred-spaces
sanctuary
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Anne Lamott |
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b897956
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We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason why they write so little. But we do. We have so much we want to say and figure out.
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Anne Lamott |
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ff81afd
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It is funny how no one seems to want my always excellent advice.
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Anne Lamott |
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b97d61b
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A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way.
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writing
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Anne Lamott |
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adbe41e
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Peg came over with dinner tonight and told me about this dumb schmaltzy poem she heard someone read at an AA meeting. It got me thinking. It was about how while we are on earth, our limitations are such that we can only see the underside of the tapestry that God is weaving. God sees the topside, the whole evolving portrait and its amazing beauty, and uses us as the pieces of thread to weave the picture. We see the glorious colors and sh..
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Anne Lamott |
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622039b
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I do not at all understand the mystery of grace--only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.
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Anne Lamott |
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f47ea1b
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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."
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Anne Lamott |
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5dd3721
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Grief ends up giving you the two best things: softness and illumination.
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Anne Lamott |
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fb92cf8
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When I was a child, I thought grown-ups and teachers knew the truth, because they told me they did. It took years for me to discover that the first step in finding out the truth is to begin unlearning almost everything adults had taught me, and to start doing all the things they'd told me NOT to do. Their main pitch was that achievement equaled happiness, when all you had to do was study rock stars, or movie stars, or them, to see that they..
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happiness
truth
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Anne Lamott |
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a737436
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I learned that God was an equal opportunity employer--that it was possible to experience the divine anywhere you were, anywhere you could see the sun and moon rise or set, or burn through the fog.
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god
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Anne Lamott |
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d8ca380
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It took me one more year to admit that I could no longer control my drinking. And finally on July 7, 1986, I quit, and let a bunch of sober alcoholics teach me how to get sober, and stay sober. God, they were such a pain in the ass.
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Anne Lamott |
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5df021e
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I sat down in the sand, breathless with shame and failure. God, I thought, some defender of the weak. Some freedom fighter: Joan of Arc in sunscreen.
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Anne Lamott |
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950124d
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we all wanted this because let's face it, it's so inspiring and such a relief when people find a way to bear the unbearable, when you can organize things in such a way that a tiny miracle appears to have taken place and that love has once again turn out to be bigger than fear and death and blindness.
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Anne Lamott |
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b0c3d73
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The truth is that your spirits don't rise until you get way down.
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Anne Lamott |