Quote

Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean they show us how to live and die.

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
Helping
Behave
Shows
Friendship
Live
Books
Book
Dies
Mean
Community
Help
Show
Understand

More quotes by Anne Lamott

Image
I liked those ladies! They were helpers, and they danced.' These are the words I want on my gravestone: that I was a helper, and that I danced.
Anne Lamott
Image
Learning to love back is the hardest part of being alive.
Anne Lamott
Image
What’s the difference between you and God? God never thinks he’s you.
Anne Lamott
Image
I devoured books like a person taking vitamins, afraid that otherwise I would remain this gelatinous narcissist, with no possibility of ever becoming thoughtful, of ever being taken seriously.
Anne Lamott
Image
They always threw their arms around and hugged me while crying our Yiddish endearments. Yet none of them believed in God. They believed in social justice, good works, Israel, and Bette Midler. I was nearly thirty before I met a religious Jew.
Anne Lamott
Image
You can either practice being right or practice being kind.
Anne Lamott
Image
Dogs are the closest we come to knowing the divine love of God on this side of eternity.
Anne Lamott
Image
Her purse was a weight, ballast it tethered her to the earth as her mind floated away.
Anne Lamott
Image
Over and over I feel as if my characters know who they are, and what happens to them, and where they have been and where they will go, and what they are capable of doing, but they need me to write it down for them because their handwriting is so bad.
Anne Lamott
Image
Expectations are resentments under construction.
Anne Lamott
Image
Left to my own devices, my first inclination is to mess in other people's lives. I secretly believe my whole family, and really the whole world, is my responsibility.
Anne Lamott
Image
I love silence. I seek and create it at every opportunity. I need it to work.
Anne Lamott
Image
Here are the two best prayers I know: 'Help me, help me, help me,' and 'Thank you, thank you, thank you.' A woman I know says, for her morning prayer, 'Whatever,' and then for the evening, 'Oh, well,' but has conceded that these prayers are more palatable for people without children.
Anne Lamott
Image
Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something—anything—down on paper. What I’ve learned to do when I sit down to work on a shitty first draft is to quiet the voices in my head.
Anne Lamott
Image
I am the woman I grew to be partly in spite of my mother, and partly because of the extraordinary love of her best friends, and my own best friends' mothers, and from surrogates, many of whom were not women at all but gay men. I have loved them my entire life, even after their passing.
Anne Lamott
Image
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 15 years later, I even started to make real money.
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
It was simple reality - most competitive tennis players in my day were privileged, spoiled, entitled and white. Also, many of them were beautiful, fit, tan and of good stock - great big hair and white teeth and long legs. Then there were the rest of us.
Anne Lamott
Image
What if we gave fifty percent of our discretionary budget to the world’s poor and then counted on the moral power of that action to protect us?
Anne Lamott
Image
This is one thing they forget to mention in most child-rearing books, that at times you will just lose your mind. Period.
Anne Lamott