"For twenty years I have ached to go back home, when there was nobody there to whom I could return."
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Quote collection
Anne Lamott quotes (page 28 of 33)
647 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I've heard people say that God is the gift of desperation, and there's a lot to be said for having really reached a bottom where you've run out of any more good ideas or plans for everybody else's behavior; or how to save and fix and rescue; or just get out of a huge mess, possibly of your own creation."
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"I suspect that he was a child who thought differently than his peers, who may have had serious conversations with grown-ups, 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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"I'd like to learn to meditate with more enthusiasm. I can sit down and get quiet for 20 minutes, but it just has not been a part of my Christianity at all."
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"I was raised in a family where none of us ever raised a voice, so there was no room to express feelings of rage or even unabashed joy - a little bashed joy, here or there, or being mildly disgruntled."
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"I went to Goucher College in Maryland for the best possible reasons - to learn - but then I dropped out at 19 for the best possible reasons - to become a writer."
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"I took notes on the people around me, in my town, in my family, in my memory. I took notes on my own state of mind, my grandiosity, the low self-esteem. I wrote down the funny stuff I overheard. I learned to be like a ship's rat, veined ears trembling, and I learned to scribble it all down."
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"My understanding is that you get to choose which of your thoughts to go with."
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"I woke up full of hate and fear the day before the most recent peace march in San Francisco. This was disappointing: I'd hoped to wake up feeling somewhere between Virginia Woolf and Wavy Gravy."
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"I got a lot of things that society had promised would make me whole and fulfilled - all the things that the culture tells you from preschool on will quiet the throbbing anxiety inside you - stature, the respect of colleagues, maybe even a kind of low-grade fame."
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"I don't think you have time to waste not writing because you are afraid you won't be good at it."
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"I didn't write about my mother much in the third year after she died. I was still trying to get my argument straight: When her friends or our relatives wondered why I was still so hard on her, I could really lay out the case for what it had been like to be raised by someone who had loathed herself, her husband, even her own name."
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"I quit my last real job, as a writer at a magazine, when I was twenty-one. That was the moment when I lost my place of prestige on the fast track, and slowly, millimeter by millimeter, I started to get found, to discover who I had been born to be, instead of the impossibly small package, all tied up tightly in myself, that I had agreed to be."
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"The worst time in any writer's life is the two months before publication. ALL writers become mental and pathetic, even those of devout faith, who have some psychological healing to lean up against, and gorgeous lives. All writers think that this time, the jig is up, and they will be exposed as frauds."
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"We were raised to believe in books, music, and nature."
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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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"Now, if you ask me, what’s going on is that we’re all up to here in it, and probably the most important thing is that we not yell at one another."
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"A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way."
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"There is a door we all want to walk through and writing can help you find it and open it."
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"Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don't worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent."
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