Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Children
Perfectionism
Needs
Forgot
Make
Mention
People
Mess
Somehow
Order
Find
Need
Messes

More quotes by Anne Lamott

Image
Don’t underestimate this gift of finding a place in the writing world: if you really work at describing creatively on paper the truth as you understand it, as you have experienced it, with the people or material who are in you, who are asking that you help them get written, you will come to a secret feeling of honor.
Anne Lamott
Image
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
Image
I was usually filled with a sense of something like shame until I'd remember that wonderful line of Blake's- that we are here to learn to endure the beams of love- and I would take a long deep breath and force these words out of my strangulated throat: Thank you.
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
Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor the enemy of the people. It will keep you insane your whole life.
Anne Lamott
Image
... the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day. [pp. 65-66]
Anne Lamott
Image
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
Image
Toddlers can make you feel as if you have violated some archaic law in their personal Koran and you should die, infidel.
Anne Lamott
Image
I get to tell my truth. I get to seek meaning and realization. I get to live fully, wildly, imperfectly. That's why I'm alive. And all I actually have to offer as a writer is my version of life. Every single thing that has happened to me is mine.
Anne Lamott
Image
I am skittish about relationships, as most of the marriages I've seen up close have been ruinous for one or both parties.
Anne Lamott
Image
Alice Adams wrote a sweet note to me after my first novel came out when I was 26, and I was so blown away that I sent her a bunch of stamps by return mail. I have no idea what I was thinking. It was a star-struck impulse.
Anne Lamott
Image
Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor, because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong. It is no wonder if we sometimes tend to take ourselves perhaps a bit too seriously.
Anne Lamott
Image
The real payoff is the writing itself, that a day when you have gotten your work done is a good day, that total dedication is the point.
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
If you fixate on the big picture, the whole shebang, the overview, you miss the stitching.
Anne Lamott
Image
I see that children fill the existential hollowness many people feel that when we have children, we know they will need us, and maybe love us, but we don't have a clue how hard it is going to be.
Anne Lamott
Image
When everything starts going wrong all at once, it is to protect something big and lovely that is trying to get itself born.
Anne Lamott
Image
There are these people who keep taking you in and feeding you and loving you and making the world a tiny bit safer than it feels. People have community and family, but existentially we are deeply isolated.
Anne Lamott
Image
Anne Lamott’s priest friend Tom, how to get through: Left foot, right foot, left foot, breathe, he said. Right foot, left foot, right foot, breathe. Salon April 25, 2003
Anne Lamott
Image
When I was young, I used to be so jealous of other girls that it crippled me.
Anne Lamott