American author (1954- )
Part of me loves and respects men so desperately, and part of me thinks they are so embarrassingly incompetent at life and in love. You have to teach them the very basics of emotional literacy. You have to teach them how to be there for you, and part of me feels tender toward them and gentle, and part of me is so afraid of them, afraid of any more violation.
ANNE LAMOTT
Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year
We all often feel like we are pulling teeth, even those writers whose prose ends up being the most natural and fluid. The right words and sentences just do not come pouring out like ticker tape most of the time.
ANNE LAMOTT
Bird by Bird
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.
ANNE LAMOTT
Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith
My heart was broken and my head was just barely inhabitable.
ANNE LAMOTT
Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith
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.
ANNE LAMOTT
"Q&A: Anne Lamott", San Diego Magazine, Jan. 27, 2014
When God is going to do something wonderful, He or She always starts with a hardship; when God is going to do something amazing, He or She starts with an impossibility.
ANNE LAMOTT
Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith
If you have a problem you can solve by throwing money at it, you don't have a very interesting problem.
ANNE LAMOTT
Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith
In biblical times, they used to stone a few thirteen-year-olds with some regularity, which helped keep the others quiet and at home. The mothers were usually in the first row of stone-throwers, and had to be restrained.
ANNE LAMOTT
Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith
We'll have the Jesusiest time ever!
ANNE LAMOTT
address at the Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College, 2000
Hope is not about proving anything. It's about choosing to believe this one thing, that love is bigger than any grim, bleak shit anyone can throw at us.
ANNE LAMOTT
Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith
I felt alternately rubbery and empty, like sometimes I was landing on the Swiss cheese, sometimes on the holes.
ANNE LAMOTT
Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith
You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the rational mind.
ANNE LAMOTT
Bird by Bird
I thought such awful thoughts that I cannot even say them out loud because they would make Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish.
ANNE LAMOTT
Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith
You keep working on your piece over and over, trying to get the sections and paragraphs and sentences and the whole just right, but there's a point at which you can tell you've begun hurting the work with your perfectionism. Then you have to release the work to new eyes.
ANNE LAMOTT
"Q&A: Anne Lamott", San Diego Magazine, Jan. 27, 2014
I tell you, it's a brand-new world, it's as radical as having an infant. And I'm as clueless. And it turns out there are no operating instructions and no owner's manual that come with a teenager either.
ANNE LAMOTT
interview, beliefnet
I'd figured out the gift of failure, which is that it breaks through all that held breath and isometric tension about needing to look good: it's the gift of feeling floppier.
ANNE LAMOTT
Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith
Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor.
ANNE LAMOTT
Bird by Bird
Slowly, after dozens of rejection slips and failures and false starts and postponed dreams--what Langston Hughes called dreams deferred--I stepped onto the hallowed ground of being a published novelist, and then, fifteen years later, I started to make real money.
ANNE LAMOTT
Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith
When people have seen you at their worst, you don't have to put on the mask as much.
ANNE LAMOTT
Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith
What people somehow forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here.
ANNE LAMOTT
Bird by Bird