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What if you wake up some day, and you're 65... and you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life?

Anne Lamott

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Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Bigs
Life
Strung
People
Juicy
Perfectionism
Pleasing
Forgot
Wake
Creative

More quotes by Anne Lamott

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My writer friends, and they are legion, do not go around beaming with quiet feelings of contentment. Most of them go around with haunted, abused, surprised looks on their faces, like lab dogs on whom very personal deodorant sprays have been tested.
Anne Lamott
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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.
Anne Lamott
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Writing takes a combination of sophistication and innocence it takes conscience, our belief that something is beautiful because it is right.
Anne Lamott
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Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist's true friend.
Anne Lamott
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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
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Gratitude, not understanding, is the secret to joy and equanimity.
Anne Lamott
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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
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I wish there were shortcuts to wisdom and self-knowledge: cuter abysses or three-day spa wilderness experiences. Sadly, it doesn't work that way. I so resent this.
Anne Lamott
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Joy is the best makeup.
Anne Lamott
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Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.
Anne Lamott
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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
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He told me about his monster. His sounded just like mine without quite so much mascara. When people shine a little light on their monster, we find out how similar most of our monsters are.
Anne Lamott
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I'm all over the place, up and down, scattered, withdrawing, trying to find some elusive sense of serenity. The world can't give that serenity. The world can't give us peace. We can only find it in our hearts. I hate that. I know. But the good news is that by the same token, the world can't take it away.
Anne Lamott
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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.
Anne Lamott
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Radical self-care is what we've been longing for, desperate for, our entire lives-friendship with our own hearts.
Anne Lamott
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I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all it is cracked up to be. But writing is.
Anne Lamott
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Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don't worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable worry about being absent or fraudulent.
Anne Lamott
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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
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Peace is joy at rest. Joy is peace on its feet. quoting her pastor in Salon, April 25, 2003
Anne Lamott
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The last song was so deep and raw and pure that I could not escape. It was as if the people were singing in between the notes, weeping and joyful at the same time, and I felt like their voices or something was rocking me in its bosom, holding me like a scared kid, and I opened up to that feeling-and it washed over me.
Anne Lamott