Anne Lamott - Quodid

About

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Anne Lamott (born April 10, 1954) is an American novelist and nonfiction writer.

Quotes from Anne Lamott

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.

importance writing art giving

And I felt like my heart had been so thoroughly and irreparably broken that there could be no real joy again. . . . Everyone wanted me to get help and rejoin life, pick up the pieces and move on, and I tried to, I wanted to, but I just had to lie in the mud with my arms wrapped around myself, eyes closed, grieving, until I didn’t have to anymore.

heart sorrow grief

How come you can hear a chord, and then another chord, and then your heart breaks open?

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.

—Anne Lamott in Plan B

Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up.

If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. Otherwise you'll just be rearranging furniture in rooms you've already been in.

mystery adventure daring

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.

You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.

God people hatred self-deception projection

Having a baby is like suddenly getting the world's worst roommate, like having Janis Joplin with a bad hangover and PMS come to stay with you.

You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.

—Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird

Age has given me what I was looking for my entire life ― it has given me me. It has provided time and experience and failures and triumphs and time-tested friends who have helped me step into the shape that was waiting for me. I fit into me now. I have an organic life, finally, not necessarily the one people imagined for me, or tried to get me to have. I have the life I longed for. I have become the woman I hardly dared imagine I would be.

—Anne Lamott in Plan B

A good marriage is where both people feel like they're getting the better end of the deal.

—Anne Lamott in Joe Jones

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.

—Anne Lamott in Traveling Mercies

When I was a child, I thought grown-ups and teachers knew the truth, because they told me they did. It took years for me to discover that the first step in finding out the truth is to begin unlearning almost everything adults had taught me, and to start doing all the things they'd told me NOT to do. Their main pitch was that achievement equaled happiness, when all you had to do was study rock stars, or movie stars, or them, to see that they were mostly miserable.

—Anne Lamott in Grace (Eventually)

Getting found almost always means being lost for a while.

—Anne Lamott in Small Victories

seeking lost found

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Books

Anne Lamott has the following books quoted on Quodid: