Quotes from Anne Lamott

Writing is about hypnotizing yourself into believing in yourself, getting some work done, then unhypnotizing yourself and going over the material coldly.

Your unconscious can't work when you are breathing down its neck.

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.

I hate the summer.

Your inside person doesn't age. Your inside person is soul, is heart, in the eternal now, the ageless, the old, the young, all the ages you've ever been.

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.

The whistle is always waiting to be blown, and in some ways, it gets me to do better work.

Reading poetry and reading the great works of the canon that we were reading in the '60s and the '70s and '80s was mind altering.

For too long, and despite what people told me, I had fallen for what the culture said about beauty, youth, features, heights, weights, hair textures, upper arms.

That thing you had to force yourself to do-the actual act of writing-turns out to be the best part.

Astonishing material and revelation appear in our lives all the time. Let it be. Unto us, so much is given. We just have to be open for business.

I cry intermittently, like a summer rain. I don't feel racked by the crying; in fact, it hydrates me. Then rage wells up in me, and I want to take a crowbar to all the cars in the neighborhood.

I don't have very sophisticated taste in music. I listen to a lot of folk music. I like reggae.

by then I'd figured out the gift of failure, which is that it breaks through all that held breath and isometric tension about needing to look good: it's the gift of feeling floppier.

My best teachers were mess, failure, death, mistakes, and the people I hated, including myself.

Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns.

Maybe it's wishful thinking, this snaggly faith of mine, or maybe it's Miles Davis saying, Don't play what's there, play what's not there.

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.

I don't write about the intimate details of my cousins and aunts and uncles, and my mother and my father because it's not right to, for me.

When you make friends with fear, it can't rule you.

What an incredible drug fear is.

Forgiveness means it finally becomes unimportant that you hit back.

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.

You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.