"I go to church every Sunday, which is like going to the gas station once a week and really, really filling up."
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Quote collection
Anne Lamott quotes (page 13 of 33)
647 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"A man dies and goes to heaven. He is being shown around by an angel. Everything is just so sweet and gentle, the total golden tender presence of God everywhere, a pond over there, a beautiful field there, and some hills for people who like to hike, and this expansiveness in every direction of sky and light and physical beauty. And there is this section separated from the rest; it has beautiful high walls. The man who's just come to heaven says, "What's over there?" The angel says, "That's for the fundamentalists. They don't consider it heaven if anyone else got in."
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"... everyone has come to understand that unconditional love is a reality, but with as shelf life of about eight to ten seconds. [p. 110]"
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"Everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, and scared, even the people who seem to have it more or less together. They are much more like you than you would believe. So try not to compare your insides to their outsides."
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"It feels like I'm babysitting in the Twilight Zone. I keep waiting for the parents to show up because we are out of chips and diet cokes."
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"Some people won't go the extra mile, and then on their birthday, when no one makes a fuss, they feel neglected and bitter."
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"My mother's eyes were large and brown, like my son's, but unlike Sam's, they were always frantic, like a hummingbird who can't quite find the flower but keeps jabbing around."
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"I was raised by my parents to believe that you had a moral obligation to try and help save the world."
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"Forgiveness means it finally becomes unimportant that you hit back."
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"You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories."
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"Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious."
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"Being enough was going to have to be an inside job."
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"...[T]here should be a real sense of your imagination and your memories walking and woolgathering, tramping the hills, romping all over the place. Trust them. Don't look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance."
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"...the three things I cannot change are the past, the truth, and you."
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"Peace is joy at rest. Joy is peace on its feet. quoting her pastor in Salon, April 25, 2003"
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"Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there."
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"Little by little, in telling Sam all these details, I got to see the bigger point of baseball, that it can give us back ourselves. We’re a crowd animal, a highly gregarious, communicative species, but the culture and the age and all the fear that fills our days have put almost everyone into little boxes, each of us all alone. But baseball, if we love it, gives us back our place in the crowd. It restores us."
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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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"Any plot you impose on your characters will be onomatopoetic: PLOT. I say don't worry about plot. Worry about the characters. Let what they say or do reveal who they are, and be involved in their lives, and keep asking yourself, Now what happens? The development of relationship creates plot."
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"And that almost everyone was struggling to wake up, to be loved, and not feel so afraid all the time. That's what the cars, degrees, booze, and drugs were about."
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