"Talking to the parents of older kids was helpful for me, since parents of kids the same age as yours won't admit how horrible their children are."
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Anne Lamott quotes (page 32 of 33)
647 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Shirley Jackson said that a confused reader is an antagonistic reader, and I live by that. It's okay to start anywhere, and to let yourself write a big sloppy overly-detailed first draft. You just jump in, knowing that the water will be cold at first, but no one is making you swim."
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"It's almost like learning to meditate to learn to hear what your kid is actually saying."
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"I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said that you can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.)"
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"We're like Magic 8-Balls. After you ask your question and shake the 8-Ball, you read the answer in the little window. If you ever broke open a Magic 8-Ball with a hammer, you discovered that it contained a many-sided plastic object, with an answer on every facet, floating in a cylinder of murky blue fluid. The many-sided core held the answer to your question. My theory is that, as with our children, as with every surface of that geodesic dome inside the 8-Ball, every age we've ever been is who we are."
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"Grace arrived, like the big, loopy stitches with which a grandmotherly stranger might baste your hem temporarily."
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"I am skittish about relationships, as most of the marriages I've seen up close have been ruinous for one or both parties."
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"I do not have deep theological understanding or opinion, but I do not read the Bible as the literal word of God."
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"My father was a writer, so I grew up writing and reading and I was really encouraged by him."
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"Drugs took me to places; they were like portals. It's kind of a cliché, but they were like portals to altered states of consciousness into ways of imagining the world, or seeing a world beyond this world, or seeing a world beyond this world that I might not have gotten to unless I discovered meditation and a very deep, intense spiritual path based on contemplation and meditation."
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"In fact, there's really only one thing that everything's made of; it's energy."
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"My father really taught me that you really develop the habit of writing and you sit down at the same time every day, you don't wait for inspiration."
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"Reading poetry and reading the great works of the canon that we were reading in the '60s and the '70s and '80s was mind altering."
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"I have been somebody who has not written a great deal about the truth of my family's life."
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"I've always understood that meditation had to be part of - or was part of the natural path and so I've always sort of dabbled in it."
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"My experience as a writer is that you really do write seven and eight pages to find the paragraph you were after all along."
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"My family tends to be pretty alcoholic and drug-addicted."
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"If I have a huge audience, I'd like a bigger audience; maybe slightly a slightly more illustrious audience."
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"I think drugs are part of the magical possibilities of youth and I wouldn't be here if I had continued with it."
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"I'm very successful, but there are 50,000 general interest books published every year. If you don't want to read mine, there are others."
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