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a8df546
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The way I dance is by writing.
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Anne Lamott |
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090a0ec
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Life is like a nice fresh batch of Swiss cheese. Note to self: savor the holes, too, like the spaces between musical notes.
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Anne Lamott |
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e2ecb43
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One of the gifts of being a writer is that it gives you an excuse to do things, to go places and explore. Another is that writing motivates you to look closely at life, at life as it lurches by and tramps around.
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Anne Lamott |
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399491f
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At five that night, I went back to the market and bought three sixteen-ounce Rainier Ales. I bounced back to my house, Mary Lou Retton-like, sipped the first ale, took the Valium, smoked a joint, drank the second ale, took another Valium, listened to "Into the Mystic" ten times, drank the third Ale, too the Valium and the Halcion, and discovered two unhappy thoughts. One was it was only seven o'clock. The second was that I was wide awake."
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Anne Lamott |
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bd24785
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Wow" has a reverberation - wowowowowow - and this pulse can soften us, like the electrical massage an acupuncturist directs to your spine or cramped muscle, which feels like a staple gun, but good."
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Anne Lamott |
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a21e363
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The speaker at the meeting, a blonde woman in a fine tailored suit, shared how alcoholism had stolen her own childhood, and had now come back for her child.
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Anne Lamott |
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ceab6b4
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Mattie was in love with Daniel, of course; this was the X within the circle on her map: I love Daniel.
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love
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Anne Lamott |
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23de864
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Our shadow is on the outside. And we can see in the dark: we can see you, we see you turn away, but one day we finally understand that you turn away not from our faces but from your own fears. From those things inside you that you think mark you as someone unlovable to your family, and society, and even to God.
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prejudice
dark
fear
see
hide
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Anne Lamott |
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3d99bc1
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A good marriage is supposed to be one where each spouse secretly thinks he or she got the better deal.
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marriage
spouse
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Anne Lamott |
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5f3fe53
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The pain does grow less acute, but 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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81b4133
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Into every life crap will fall. Most of us do as well as possible, and some of it works okay, and we try to release that which doesn't and which is never going to.
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Anne Lamott |
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398cc17
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I like to think that Henry James said his classic line, "A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost," while looking for his glasses, and that they were on top of his head."
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writer
writing
authoring
authors
write
on-writing
writers
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Anne Lamott |
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978d392
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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. Two parts fit together. This hadn't occur..
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Anne Lamott |
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473ce59
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These lines of D.H. Lawrence are taped to the wall of my office: "What is the knocking? What is the knocking at the door in the night? It is somebody wants to do us harm. No, no, it is the three strange angels. Admit them, admit them." I under[stand] that failure is surely one of these strange angels."
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Anne Lamott |
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08414cc
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Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor, because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong. It is no wonder if we sometimes tend to take ourselves perhaps a bit too seriously.
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Anne Lamott |
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70d806e
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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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cd55002
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when humans experience something as powerful as a forest or a rainbow, it is not crazy to assign its existence to a Greater Intelligence.
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god
rainbow
forest
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Anne Lamott |
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ed02d53
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why do we make it all seem like a crisis, over and over again? Why do we worry it all to death, like dogs with socks or chew-toys? 'Look at it this way...In a hundred years? - All new people.
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Anne Lamott |
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f0cc102
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What if you wake up at sixty and realize that you forgot to wake up, and you never became the person you were born to be, and now your hair is falling out?
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Anne Lamott |
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3099769
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Opening myself to my own love and to life's tough loveliness not only was the most delicious, amazing thing on earth but also was quantum. It would radiate out to a cold, hungry world. Beautiful moments heal, as do real cocoa, Pete Seeger, a walk on old fire roads. All I ever wanted since I arrived here on earth were the same things I needed as a baby, to go from cold to warm, lonely to held, the vessel to the giver, empty to full. You can ..
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Anne Lamott |
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4690bfa
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Say to yourself in the kindest possible way, Look, honey, all we're going to do for now is to write a description of the river at sunrise, or the young child swimming in the pool at the club, or the first time the man sees the woman he will marry. That is all we are going to do for now. We are just going to take this bird by bird. But we are going to finish this one short assignment.
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Anne Lamott |
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9839f5b
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If you want to change the way you feel about people, you have to change the way you treat them.
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Anne Lamott |
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8383e75
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But when someone enters that valley with you, that mud, it somehow saves you again.
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Anne Lamott |
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b8b5ccf
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Because for some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave.
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Anne Lamott |
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8955fa2
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I learned that opening myself to my own love and to life's tough loveliness not only was the most delicious, amazing thing on earth but also was quantum. It would radiate out to a cold, hungry world. Beautiful moments heal, as do real cocoa, Pete Seeger, a walk on old fire roads.
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Anne Lamott |
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eb84cf6
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I mean "God" as Jane Kenyon described God: "I am food on the prisoner's plate . . . / the patient gardener / of the dry and weedy garden . . . / the stone step, / the latch, and the working hinge." I mean "God" as shorthand for the Good, for the animating energy of love; for Life, for the light that radiates from within people and from above; in the energies of nature, even in our rough, messy selves." --
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Anne Lamott |
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4b6bd19
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You may have gotten into the habit of doubting that voice that was telling you quite clearly what was really going on. It is essential you get that back.
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Anne Lamott |
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0d3e056
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The welcome book would have taught us that power and signs of status can't save us, that welcome--both offering and receiving--is our source of safety. Various chapters and verses of this book would remind us that we are wanted and even occasionally delighted in, despite the unfortunate truth that we are greedy-grabby, self-referential, indulgent, overly judgmental, and often hysterical. Somehow that book "went missing." Or when the editori..
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Anne Lamott |
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d760525
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I've spent my whole life trying to get over having had Nikki for a mother, and I have to say that from day one after she died, I liked having a dead mother much more than having an impossible one. [p. 47]
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Anne Lamott |
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b7ccf03
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Sam was alternately distant and clingy and mean, because I am the primary person he banks on and bangs on. I stayed close enough so he could push me away. Sadie slowly floated off.
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Anne Lamott |
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63f925a
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Talking to the parents of older kids was helpful for me, since the parents of kids the same age as yours won't admit how horrible their children are. ... you can either practice being right or practice being kind. Screaming in the car helped. [p. 94]
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Anne Lamott |
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d4eee71
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So I pray for people who are hurting, that they be filled with air and light. Air and light heal; they somehow get into those dark, musty places, like spiritual antibiotics. We don't have to figure out how this all works--"Figure it out" is not a good slogan. It's enough to know it does."
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Anne Lamott |
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1cf96ed
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What if Sam's heart got broken again? As with most kids who are fourteen, it has been spackled and duct-taped and caulked back together many times as it is. [p. 258]
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Anne Lamott |
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143ebd5
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I went around saying for a long time that I am not one of those Christians who is heavily into forgiveness -- that I am one of the other kind. But even though it was funny, and actually true, it started to be too painful to stay this way. They say we are not punished for the sin but by the sin, and I began to feel punished by my unwillingness to forgive.
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Anne Lamott |
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d62e594
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The single most radical thing I know . . . is that I get to take care of myself.
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Anne Lamott |
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f1c4a1e
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A sober friend from Texas said once that the three things I cannot change are the past, the truth, and you. I hate this insight so much.
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life-philosophy
insight
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Anne Lamott |
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55f122b
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With THC in your system, you don't dream. And you need to. Otherwise it is like losing one of your senses. Dreams are part of your wholeness. ... when you're dreaming, you're not the one calling the shots. So it's a reprieve. ... the dream world had rules in it. You couldn't read a clock in your dreams. It would not give you the time. If the lights were on in a room, you could not turn them off in a dream. ... in indigenous tribes all over ..
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Anne Lamott |
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b22d33b
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Until recently I barely even knew the signs of welcome, like the way a person plopped down across from me and sighed deeply while looking at me with relief: a shy look on someone's face that gave me time to breathe and settle in. I didn't know that wounds and scars were what we find welcoming, because they are like ours. Trappings and charm wear off, I've learned. The book of welcome says, Let people see you.
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Anne Lamott |
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8f16f90
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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. I can be received gladly or grudgingly, in big gulps or in tiny tastes, like a deer at the salt.
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Anne Lamott |
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5fea1ba
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Maybe what you care most passionately about are fasting and high colonics--cappuccino enemas, say. This is fine, but we do not want you to write about them; we will secretly believe that you are simply spiritualizing your hysteria. There are millions of people already doing this at churches and New Age festivals across the land.
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Anne Lamott |
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a811e96
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Rumi: "Where there is ruin, there is hope for a treasure."
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Anne Lamott |
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af9807f
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He is a writer. He makes the rest of them nervous.
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Anne Lamott |
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7516358
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No one has expressed it better than a great novelist I heard once on a talk show who said something like "You want to know the price I pay for being a writer? Okay, I'll tell you. I travel by plane a great deal. And I'm usually seated next to some huge businessman who works on files or his laptop computer for a while, and then notices me and asks me what I do. And I say I'm a writer. Then there's always a terrible silence. Then he says eage..
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Anne Lamott |
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cf9c3bb
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Holiness has most often been revealed to me in the exquisite pun of the first syllable, in holes- in not enough help, in brokenness, mess. High holy places, with ethereal sounds and stained glass, can massage my illusion of holiness, but in holes and lostness I can pick up the light of small ordinary progress, newly made moments flecked like pepper into the slog and the disruptions.
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faith
ordinary
holy
holiness
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Anne Lamott |