Authors:

A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z

Anne Lamott Quotes - Page 13

All Quotes Acceptance Age Animation Anxiety Art Atheist Awakening Belief Caring Certainty Character Children Church Commitment Community Culture Dancing Discipline Doubt Drinking Earth Effort Energy Expectations Faith Fear Feelings Giving Giving Up God Goodness Grace Gratitude Grief Grieving Hardship Hate Healing Heart Heaven Home Hurt Inspiration Inspirational Inspiring Intuition Jesus Joy Laughter Life Loss Lying Magic Makeup Mask Memories Morning Mountain Pain Parenting Past Perfectionism Prayer Progress Reading Reality Recovery Resentment Running Self Esteem Shame Silence Singing Son Soul Spring Struggle Students Suffering Sunday Tea Understanding Vision Waiting Water Worry Writing

Some people wanted to get rich or famous, but my friends and I wanted to get real. We wanted to get deep. (Also, I suppose, we wanted to get laid.)

Some people wanted to get rich or famous, but my friends and I wanted to get real. We wanted to get deep. (Also, I suppose, we wanted to get laid.)

Real, People, Rich

Two things put me in the spirit to give. One is that I have come to think of everyone with whom I come into contast as a patient in the emergency room. I see a lot of gaping wounds and dazed expressions. Or, as Marianne Moore put it, "The world's an orphan's home." And this feels more true than almost anything else I know. But so many of us can be soothed by writing: think of how many times you have opened a book, read one line, and said, "Yes!" And I want to give people that feeling, too, of connection, communication.

Book, Communication, Home

My natural tendency is to complicate everything--and then to spray words and ideas onto everything afterwards. I've had to develop the habit of keeping things simple.

Simple, Ideas, Habit

"Interview with Anne Lamott, Author of Help, Thanks, Wow". Interview with Jana Llewellyn, www.friendsjournal.org. January 30, 2013.

When everything starts going wrong all at once, it is to protect something big and lovely that is trying to get itself born.

Lovely, Trying, Born

Anne Lamott (2000). “Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith”, p.96, Anchor

No one tells you that your life is effectively over when you have a child: that you're never going to draw another complacent breath again... or that whatever level of hypochondria and rage you'd learned to repress and live with is going to seem like the good old days.

Children, Levels, Life Is

These days cry out, as never before, for us to pay attention, so we can move through them and get our joy and pride back.

Moving, Pride, Joy

You are desperate to communicate, to edify or entertain, to preserve moments of grace or joy or transcendence, to make real or imagined events come alive. But you cannot will this to happen. It is a matter of persistence and faith and hard work. So you might as well just go ahead and get started.

Real, Hard Work, Persistence

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.

Struggle, Car, Drug

Anne Lamott (2008). “Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith”, p.10, Penguin

You know how I always say that laughter is carbonated holiness? Well, Robin was the ultimate proof of that, and bubbles are spirit made visible.

Laughter, Robins, Holiness

I am going to try to pay attention to the spring. I am going to look around at all the flowers, and look up at the hectic trees. I am going to close my eyes and listen.

Spring, Flower, Eye

The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little. But we do. We have so much we want to say and figure out.

Writing, Sheep, Needs

Anne Lamott (2007). “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life”, p.3, Anchor

Perfectionism means that you try desperately not to leave so much mess to clean up. But clutter and mess show us that life is being lived. Clutter is wonderfully fertile ground - you can still discover new treasures under all those piles, clean things up, edit things out, fix things, get a grip. Tidiness suggests that something is as good as it's going to get. Tidiness makes me think of held breath, of suspended animation, while writing needs to breathe and move.

Moving, Writing, Mean

Your experiences will be yours alone. But truth and best friendship will rarely if ever disappoint you.

Best Friendship, Disappoint, Ifs

I loved every second of Catholic church. I loved the sickly sweet rotting-pomegranate smells of the incense. I loved the overwrought altar, the birdbath of holy water, the votive candles; I loved that there was a poor box, the stations of the cross rendered in stained glass on the windows.

Sweet, Glasses, Smell

Anne Lamott (2000). “Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith”, p.10, Anchor

You are going to have to give and give and give, or there's no reason for you to be writing. You have to give from the deepest part of yourself, and you are going to have to go on giving, and the giving is going to have to be its own reward. There is no cosmic importance to your getting something published, but there is in learning to be a giver.

Writing, Giving, Goes On

I wish I had thrown out the bathroom scale at age 16. Weighing yourself every morning is like waking up and asking Dick Cheney to validate your sense of inner worth.

Morning, Wish, Age

Mattie sat at the table, obsessing, orbiting around herself. She was sick of her worried, hostile mind. It would have killed her long before, she felt, if it hadn't needed the transportation.

Long, Sick, Mind

Anne Lamott (2003). “Blue Shoe”, Riverhead Trade (Paperbacks)

I worry that Jesus drinks himself to sleep when he hears me talk like this.

Jesus, Sleep, Worry

Evangelical Christians and I can sit down and talk one on one about how much we love Jesus, and yet I'm not carried in Christian bookstores.

Christian, Jesus, Bookstores

You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your unconscious to kick in for you creatively. ... You put a piece of paper in the typewriter, or you turn on your computer and bring up the right file. ... You begin rocking, just a little at first, and then like a huge autistic child. ... Then your mental illnesses arrive at the desk like your sickest, most secretive relatives. And they pull up chairs in a semicircle around the computer, and they try to be quiet but you know they are there with their weird coppery breath, leering at you behind your back.

Children, Typewriters, Trying

If we can believe in the Gnostic gospel of Thomas, old Uncle Jesus said, "If you bring forth what is inside you, what you bring forth will save you. If you don't bring forth what is inside you, what you bring forth can destroy you.

Jesus, Uncles, Believe

Anne Lamott (2007). “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life”, p.199, Anchor

The grief and tears didn't wash me away. They gave me my life back! They cleansed me, baptized me, hydrated the earth at my feet.

Grief, Feet, Tears

If you don't die of thirst, there are blessings in the desert. You can be pulled into limitlessness, which we all yearn for, or you can do the beauty of minutiae, the scrimshaw of tiny and precise. The sky is your ocean, and the crystal silence will uplift you like great gospel music, or Neil Young.

Uplifting, Ocean, Blessing

There is ecstasy in paying attention. You can get into a kind of Wordsworthian openness to the world, where you see in everything the essence of holiness.

Inspirational, Essence, Holiness

Anne Lamott (2007). “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life”, p.100, Anchor

Novels ought to have hope; at least, American novels ought to have hope. French novels don't need to. We mostly win wars, they lose them. Of course, they did hide more Jews than many other countries, and this is a form of winning.

Country, War, Winning

Anne Lamott (2007). “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life”, p.51, Anchor

You May Also Like: