Quote

I have a giant ego and terrible self-esteem, so I need to hit the re-set button fairly regularly - to get into presence, and humility, and being right-sized.

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
Presence
Button
Humility
Regularly
Terrible
Buttons
Self
Giant
Need
Fairly
Right
Giants
Needs
Ego
Esteem
Sized

More quotes by 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
Image
Everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, and scared, even the people who seem to have it more or less together. They are much more like you than you would believe. So try not to compare your insides to their outsides.
Anne Lamott
Image
She lived in fear of ifonic endings.
Anne Lamott
Image
I’m probably just as good a mother as the next repressed, obsessive-compulsive paranoiac.
Anne Lamott
Image
Write as if your parents are dead.
Anne Lamott
Image
The movement of grace toward gratitude brings us from the package of self-obsessed madness to a spiritual awakening.
Anne Lamott
Image
My idea of absolute happiness is to be in bed on a rainy day, with my blankie, my cat, and my dog.
Anne Lamott
Image
The thing about light is that it really isn’t yours it’s what you gather and shine back. And it gets more power from reflectiveness if you sit still and take it in, it fills your cup, and then you can give it off yourself.
Anne Lamott
Image
Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.
Anne Lamott
Image
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
Image
Peace is joy at rest. Joy is peace on its feet. quoting her pastor in Salon, April 25, 2003
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
If you are a writer, or want to be a writer, this is how you spend your days--listening, observing, storing things away, making your isolation pay off. You take home all you've taken in, all that you've overheard, and you turn it into gold. (Or at least you try.)
Anne Lamott
Image
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
Image
Some people have a thick skin and you don’t. Your heart is really open and that is going to cause pain, but that is an appropriate response to this world. The cost is high, but the blessing of being compassionate is beyond your wildest dreams.
Anne Lamott
Image
What fills us is real, sweet, dopey, funny life.
Anne Lamott
Image
Very few writers really know what they are doing until they have done it.
Anne Lamott
Image
I don't want something special. I want something beautifully plain.
Anne Lamott
Image
One of the gifts of being a writer is that it gives you an excuse to do things, to go places and explore. Another is that writing motivates you to look closely at life, at life as it lurches by and tramps around.
Anne Lamott
Image
I used to think that paired opposites were a given, that love was the opposite of hate, right the opposite of wrong. But now I think we sometimes buy into these concepts because it is so much easier to embrace absolutes than to suffer reality. I don't think anything is the opposite of love. Reality is unforgivingly complex.
Anne Lamott