Anne Lamott Quotes

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.

It's intrusive for grandparents to think they're in charge. It's manipulative. Also, it's self-destructive, since if the parents have to resist you, you won't get your mitts on the kid as often.

Again and again I tell God I need help, and God says, 'Well, isn't that fabulous? Because I need help too. So you go get that old woman over there some water, and I'll figure out what we're going to do about your stuff.

I used to tell my writing students that they must write the books they wished they could come upon - because then the books they hungered and thirsted for would exist.

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.

Perfectionism means that you try not to leave so much mess to clean up. But clutter and mess show us that life is being lived.

Jealousy always has been my cross, the weakness and woundedness in me that has most often caused me to feel ugly and unlovable, like the Bad Seed. I’ve had many years of recovery and therapy, years filled with intimate and devoted friendships, yet I still struggle. I know that when someone gets a big slice of pie, it doesn’t mean there’s less for me. In fact, I know that there isn’t even a pie, that there’s plenty to go around, enough food and love and air. But I don’t believe it for a second. I secretly believe there’s a pie. I will go to my grave brandishing my fork.

I've always thought I could use my brain and my heart to jockey everyone around to the good. But life is not jockeyable. When you try, you make people infinitely crazier than they already were, including or especially yourself.

Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises.

I love memoirs. They are probably my favorite literary form, along with biographies. The more confessional, the better. There is so, so, so little truth in the popular culture, and I am starved and grateful for any I can find.

I cry intermittently, like a summer rain. I don't feel racked by the crying; in fact, it hydrates me. Then rage wells up in me, and I want to take a crowbar to all the cars in the neighborhood.

Tell the truth as you understand it. If you're a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act - truth is always subversive.

Life with most teenagers was like having a low-grade bladder infection. It hurts, but you had to tough it out.

They believe that if they do get published, a wonderful new life is in store. It will turn out that deep down they are really valuable people and will have lots of money from now on and really cool people like Ethan Hawke will be dropping by all the time. But it's a lie. Being a published writer will make them long to be ONLY as mentally ill as they are now. Their current level of obsession and doubt and self-loathing will look like the good old days. Honest.

Forgiveness means it finally becomes unimportant that you hit back. You're done. It doesn't necessarily mean that you want to have lunch with the person. If you keep hitting back, you stay trapped in the nightmare.

Learning to love back is the hardest part of being alive.

You are not your bank account, or your ambitiousness. You're not the cold clay lump with a big belly you leave behind when you die. You're not your collection of walking personality disorders. You are spirit, you are love.

And you try to quiet your mind so you can hear.

If we stay where we are, where we're stuck, where we're comfortable and safe, we die there... When nothing new can get in, that's death.

The problem with God - or at any rate, one of the top five most annoying things about God - is that he or she rarely answers right away.

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.

Forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a better past.

I spend most of my time alone, because I so value and thrive in the quiet. Heaven.

No matter what circumstances, it's hard to be a parent and maintain a sense of self and identity in the world.

It helps to resign as the controller of your fate. All that energy we expend to keep things running right is not what's keeping things running right. We're bugs struggling in the river, brightly visible to the trout below. With that fact in mind, people like me make up all these rules to give us the illusion that we are in charge. I need to say to myself, they're not needed, hon. Just take in the buggy pleasures. Be kind to the others, grab the fleck of riverweed, notice how beautifully your bug legs scull.

I didn't need to understand the hypostatic unity of the Trinity; I just needed to turn my life over to whoever came up with redwood trees.

Maybe it's wishful thinking, this snaggly faith of mine, or maybe it's Miles Davis saying, Don't play what's there, play what's not there.

I'm drawn to almost any piece of writing with the words 'divine love' and 'impeachment' in the first sentence. But I know the word 'divine' makes many progressive people run screaming for their cute little lives, and so one hesitates to use it.

I think that is why we stay close to our families, no matter how neurotic the members, how deeply annoying or dull- because when people have seen you at your worst, you don’t have to put on the mask as much.

Grace means you're in a different universe from where you had been stuck, when you had absolutely no way to get there on your own.

Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report written on birds that he'd had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books about birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, "Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.

if you want to know how God feels about money, look at whom she gives it to.

The world is always going to be dangerous, and people get badly banged up, but how can there be more meaning than helping one another stand up in a wind and stay warm?

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.)

Having a child as a single mother was a crucible - maybe this is true for all parents. I got rid of so much stuff that didn't really matter in the scheme of things-like throwing stuff out of an airplane that kept me flying too low. What was left was essential, i.e. not a lot of extraneous stuff that had kept me busy and people-pleasing. I just didn't have the luxury of wasting my life force on so much stupidity and distraction. That made me strong.

I'm one of those religious people who are afraid of everything. I'm instantly worried about everything that could go wrong.

I accidentally forgot to graduate from college.

I don't want something special. I want something beautifully plain.

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.

I write everything as a wake-up call to myself and others, to anyone who may have gotten tired of hitting the snooze button.

All I know is that after 10 years of being sober, with huge support to express my pain and anger and shadow, 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. They brought me home, to me, to the truth of me.

I am all the ages I've ever been.

Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.

Everybody thinks their opinion is the right one. If they didn't, they would get a new one.

These are pictures of the people in my family where we look like the most awkward and desperate folk you ever saw, poster children for the human condition.

I like the desert for short periods of time, from inside a car, with the windows rolled up, and the doors locked. I prefer beach resorts with room service.

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

She felt as if the mosaic she had been assembling out of life's little shards got dumped to the ground, and there was no way to put it back together.