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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| e687183 | If it is someone else's problem, you probably don't have the solution. | Anne Lamott | ||
| db817b3 | The medieval German mystic Meister Eckhart said that if the soul could have known God without the world, God never would have created the world. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 862cdac | The Amen is only as good as the attitude. If you are trying to finish up quickly so you can check your cell phone messages, you are missing the chance to spend quiet moments with the giver of life and the eternal, which means you may reap continued feelings of life racing along without you. So as Samuel Beckett admonished us to fail again, and fail better, we try to pray again, and pray better, for slightly longer and with slightly more hon.. | prayer | Anne Lamott | |
| a09c8d2 | The good news is that if you don't seal up your heart with caulking compound, and instead stay permeable, people stay alive inside you, and maybe outside you, too, forever. This | Anne Lamott | ||
| 74c083f | In May 1992, I went to Ixtapa with my son, Sam, who was then two and a half. At the time, my best friend of twenty years, named Pammy, had been battling breast cancer for two years. I also had a boyfriend with whom I spoke two or three times a day, whom I loved and who loved me. Then, in early November of that year, the big eraser came down and got Pammy, and it also got the boyfriend, from whom I parted by mutual agreement. The grief was h.. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 586a081 | They taught me to pay attention, but not so much attention to my tiny princess mind. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 52a6d19 | It's like bitch-slapping E.T. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 566fc9d | 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 .. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 9a8d434 | You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do." -Anne Lamott" | Angela Roquet | ||
| ac44f92 | In paintings, music, poetry, architecture, we feel the elusive energy that moves through us and the air and the ground all the time, that usually disperses and turns chaotic in our busy-ness and distractedness and moodiness. Artists channel it, corral it, make it visible to the rest of us. The best works of art are like semaphores of our experience, signaling what we didn't know was true but do now. | life-philosophy music poetry | Anne Lamott | |
| e6a2abe | You've heard it said that when all else fails, follow instructions. So we breathe, try to slow down and pay attention, try to love and help God's other children, and - hardest of all, at least to me - learn to love our depressing, hilarious, mostly decent selves. We get thirsty people water, read to the very young and old, and listen to the sad. We pick up litter and try to leave the world a slightly better place for our stay here. Those ar.. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 945c839 | Jesus is busy with his own stuff, and is not going to get involved in your little tug-of-war. Plus, don't forget, he has his own mother to deal with. She's all he can handle, as far as mothers go. | family | Anne Lamott | |
| 5244792 | It's always the same old problem: how to find ourselves in the great yammering of ego and tragedy and discomfort and obsession with everyone else's destinies. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 6394fe3 | I started to cry then, and I cried for a long time without making much noise. I cried and cried like a little kid. | Anne Lamott | ||
| f9c2938 | Everyone was on God's payroll, whether they knew it or not. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 796fa85 | I told myself that historically when people do too well too quickly, they are a Greek tragedy waiting to happen. | Anne Lamott | ||
| e86516d | She wants to have hiked; I want to have had dessert. | Anne Lamott | ||
| d2b1531 | My father treated them with respect and kindness, his main philosophical and spiritual position being: Don't be an asshole. | Anne Lamott | ||
| bba631a | You want to avoid at all costs drawing your characters on those that already exist in other works of fiction. You must learn about people from people, not from what you read. Your reading should confirm what you've observed in the world. | reading writing | Anne Lamott | |
| 2f9de01 | God has smiled on me, He has set me free." For us to acknowledge that we have been set free from toxic dependency, from crippling obsession or guilt, that we have been graced with the ability finally to forgive someone, is just plain astonishing." | Anne Lamott | ||
| e4cf642 | 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. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 2a823c5 | Grace means suddenly you're in a different universe from the one where you were stuck, and there was absolutely no way for you to get there on your own. | Anne Lamott | ||
| dae8d46 | It can be too sad here. We so often lose our way. It is easy to sense and embrace meaning when life is on track. When there is a feeling of fullness--having love, goodness, family, work, maybe God as parts of life--it's easier to navigate around the sadness that you inevitably stumble across. Life holds beauty, magic and anguish. Sometimes sorrow is unavoidable, even when your kids are little, when the marvels of your children, and your par.. | Anne Lamott | ||
| bceec9b | Now, practically even better news than that of short assignments is the idea of shitty first drafts. All good writers write them. | author first-drafts write writer writing | Anne Lamott | |
| 9390611 | Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen our sense of life: they feed the soul. 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. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 08471e3 | anyone who survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 43311a4 | For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts. | on-writing the-writing-process write writer writing writing-advice | Anne Lamott | |
| 6bfb801 | When we are stunned to the place beyond words, we're finally starting to get somewhere. It is so much more comfortable to think that we know what it all means, what to expect and how it all hangs together. When we are stunned to the place beyond words, when an aspect of life takes us away from being able to chip away at something until it's down to a manageable size and then to file it nicely away, when all we can say in response is "Wow," .. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 7c06854 | There really is only today, although luckily that is also the eternal now. | Anne Lamott | ||
| d46a0c2 | I am positive of only a few things in life, and one is that if you want to have a decent middle and old age, you have to get exercise almost every day. | day life | Anne Lamott | |
| cda8f7b | We think we're humans having spiritual experiences, but we're really spirits having human experiences, | Anne Lamott | ||
| c75d0fc | When you're kind to people, and you pay attention, you make a field of comfort around them, and you get it back--the Golden Rule meets the Law of Karma meets Murphy's Law. | comfort golden-rule law-of-karma murphy-s-law people | Anne Lamott | |
| f6a4645 | First find a path, and a little light to see by. Then push up your sleeves and start helping. | path sleeve | Anne Lamott | |
| c2e4244 | There may be a Nurse Ratched-like listing of things that must be done right this moment: foods that must come out of the freezer, appointments that must be canceled or made, hairs that must be tweezed. But you hold an imaginary gun to your head and make yourself stay at the desk. | bird-by-bird on-writing the-writing-process write writer writing writing-advice writing-help | Anne Lamott | |
| efc8df7 | Forgiving people doesn't necessarily mean you want to meet them for lunch. It means you try to undo the Velcro hook. Lewis Smedes said it best: "To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you." | Anne Lamott | ||
| c1c8c1a | In the face of everything, we slowly come through. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 0345ffd | Pretending that things are nicely boxed up and put away robs us of great riches. | Anne Lamott | ||
| bc319a7 | To heal, it seems we have to stand in the middle of the horror, at the foot of the cross, and wait out another's suffering where that person can see us. | Anne Lamott | ||
| bef8b2a | It is as if the right words, the true words, are already inside them, and they just want to help them get out. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 335cf13 | But as Rumi said, "Through love all pain will turn to medicine," not most pain, or for other people; and the pain and failures grew me, helped slowly restore me to the person I was born to be. I had to learn that life was not going to be filling if I tried to scrunch myself into somebody else's idea of me, i.e., someone sophisticated enough to prefer dark chocolate. I like milk chocolate, like M&M's: so sue me. But I no longer have to stuff.. | Anne Lamott | ||
| c62aa6a | E. L. Doctorow once said that "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." You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. 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." | Anne Lamott | ||
| da6811e | Nothing can be delicious when you are holding your breath. For something to be delicious, you have to be present to savor it, and presence is in attention and in the flow of breath. It begins in the mouth, my parents' preferred site of comfort, and then it connects our heads to our bodies through our throats, and into our lungs and tummies, a beautiful connective cord of air. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 7d43e4d | 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." You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. 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." | Anne Lamott | ||
| d073bc5 | You don't always have to chop with the sword of truth. You can point with it, too. | Anne Lamott |