Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Writing
Behaved
People
Happened
Write
Tell
Stories
Better
Wanted
Everything
Warmly

More quotes by Anne Lamott

Image
Your experiences will be yours alone. But truth and best friendship will rarely if ever disappoint you.
Anne Lamott
Image
This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won't wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be.
Anne Lamott
Image
I do believe that God is with us even when we're at our craziest and that this goodness guides, provides, and protects.
Anne Lamott
Image
My mother might find a thin gold chain at the back of a drawer, wadded into an impossibly tight knot, and give it to me to untangle. It would have a shiny, sweaty smell, and excite me: Gold chains linked you to the great fairy tales and myths, to Arabia, and India to the great weight of the world, but lighter than a feather.
Anne Lamott
Image
When we're dealing with the people in our family - no matter how annoying or gross they may be, no matter how self-inflicted their suffering may appear, no matter how afflicted they are with ignorance, prejudice or nose hairs - we give from the deepest parts of ourselves.
Anne Lamott
Image
Age has given me what I was looking for my entire life - it gave me me. It provided the time and experience and failures and triumphs and friends who helped me step into the shape that had been waiting for me all my life...I not only get along with me most of the time now, I am militantly and maternally on my own side.
Anne Lamott
Image
Clutter and mess show us that life is being lived.
Anne Lamott
Image
Laughter is a bubbly, effervescent form of holiness
Anne Lamott
Image
Everyone is flailing through this life without an owner's manual, with whatever modicum of grace and good humor we can manage.
Anne Lamott
Image
For twenty years I have ached to go back home, when there was nobody there to whom I could return.
Anne Lamott
Image
Churches are good for prayer, but so are garages and cars and mountains and showers and dance floors.
Anne Lamott
Image
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.
Anne Lamott
Image
When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again.
Anne Lamott
Image
When we search for something larger than our own selves to hook into, we can come through whatever life throws at us.
Anne Lamott
Image
Needless to say, there was no one around remotely fitting the description of a normal person: I was at a writing conference.
Anne Lamott
Image
It's good to do uncomfortable things. It's weight training for life.
Anne Lamott
Image
I was reminded of the Four Immutable Laws of the Spirit: Whoever is present are the right people. Whenever it begins is the right time. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened. And when it's over, it's over.
Anne Lamott
Image
I thought the secret of life was obvious: be here now, love as if your whole life depended on it, find your life's work, and try to get hold of a giant panda.
Anne Lamott
Image
Living on Earth has always been a dangerous way to spend your time.
Anne Lamott
Image
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.
Anne Lamott