Anne Lamott
Any plot you impose on your characters will be onomatopoetic: PLOT. I say don't worry about plot. Worry about the characters. Let what they say or do reveal who they are, and be involved in their lives, and keep asking yourself, Now what happens? The development of relationship creates plot.Collection: Character
I said that I thought the secret of life was obvious: be here now, love as if your whole life depended on it, find your life's work, and try to get hold of a giant panda. If you had a giant panda in your back yard, anything could go wrong — someone could die, or stop loving you, or you could get sick — and if you could look outside and see this adorable, ridiculous, boffo panda, you'd start to laugh; you'd be so filled with thankfulness and amusement that everything would be O.K. again.Collection: Adorable
Here's how I became myself: mess, failure, mistakes, disappointments, and extensive reading; limbo, indecision, setbacks, addiction, public embarrassment, and endless conversations with my best women friends; the loss of people without whom I could not live, the loss of pets that left me reeling, dizzying betrayals but much greater loyalty, and overall, choosing as my motto William Blake's line that we are here to learn to endure the beams of love.Collection: Loyalty
Everybody thinks their opinion is the right one. If they didn't, they would get a new one.Collection: Thinking
They believe that if they do get published, a wonderful new life is in store. It will turn out that deep down they are really valuable people and will have lots of money from now on and really cool people like Ethan Hawke will be dropping by all the time. But it's a lie. Being a published writer will make them long to be ONLY as mentally ill as they are now. Their current level of obsession and doubt and self-loathing will look like the good old days. Honest.Collection: Lying
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.Collection: Thinking
Being a parent is absolutely exhausting and draining, along with all the joy and love.Collection: Joy
Creative expression, whether that means writing, dancing, bird-watching, or cooking, can give a person almost everything that he or she has been searching for: enlivenment, peace, meaning, and the incalculable wealth of time spent quietly in beauty.Collection: Mean
Pets are the world to me. I think they are the most obvious manifestations of divine love that we are going to see this side of eternity.Collection: Thinking
This is who I want to be in the world. This is who I think we are supposed to be, people who help call forth human beings from deep inside hopelessness.Collection: Thinking
I'm here to be me, which is taking a great deal longer than I had hoped.Collection: Deals
No matter how people mess with you or let you down, or how you let yourself down, a good book means that when you get in bed that night, you have a good hour. I feel like you pay all day for that hour. That's what books mean to me. I can open this two-dimensional , flat white page with squiggly little black marks on them, and someone has created this world that you're going to enter into.Collection: Book
Grief, as I read somewhere once, is a lazy Susan. One day it is heavy and underwater, and the next day it spins and stops at loud and rageful, and the next day at wounded keening, and the next day numbness, silence.Collection: Grief
Radical self-care is what we've been longing for, desperate for, our entire lives-friendship with our own hearts.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Want
Every time I see the bumper sticker that says “We think we’re humans having spiritual experiences, but we’re really spirits having human experiences,” I (a) think it’s true and (b) want to ram the car.Collection: Spiritual
You don't want to spend your time around people who make you hold your breath. You can't fill up when you're holding your breath. And writing is about filling up, filling up when you are empty, letting images and ideas and smells run down like water - just as writing is also about dealing with the emptiness.Collection: Running
We're all afraid of the same stuff. Mostly we're afraid that we're secretly not okay, that we're disgusting, or frauds, or about to be diagnosed with cancer. ... We want to teach you how to quiet the yammer ... how you can create comfort, inside and outside, how you can get warm, how you can feed yourself. And even learn to get through silence. ... There is a wilderness inside you, and a banquet. Both. [p. 253]Collection: Cancer
All I ever wanted since I arrived here on earth are the same things I needed as a baby, to go from cold to warm, lonely to held, the vessel to the giver, empty to full.Collection: Baby
The reason 'help' is such a great prayer is that God is the gift of desperation. When you're in despair, you're teachable.Collection: Prayer
Sometimes it takes failure to figure out who you aren't.Collection: Sometimes
I guess he'll have to figure out someday that he is supposed to have this dark side, that it is part of what it means to be human, to have the darkness just as much as the light- that in fact the dark parts make the light visible; without them, the light would disappear. But I guess he has to figure other stuff out first, like how to keep his neck from flopping all over the place and how to sit up.Collection: Mean
The movement of grace toward gratitude brings us from the package of self-obsessed madness to a spiritual awakening.Collection: Spiritual
Do you mind even a little that you are still addicted to people-pleasing, and are still putting everyone else’s needs and laundry and career ahead of your creative, spiritual life? Giving all your life force away, to “help” and impress. Well, your help is not helpful, and falls short.Collection: Spiritual
And yet, I do believe there is ultimately meaning in the chaos, and also in the doldrums. What I resist is not the truth but when people put a pretty bow on scary things instead of saying, 'This is a nightmare. I hate everything. I’m going to go hide in the garage.'Collection: Hate
Try to write in a directly emotional way, instead of being too subtle or oblique. Don't be afraid of your material or your past. Be afraid of wasting any more time obsessing about how you look and how people see you. Be afraid of not getting your writing done.Collection: Writing
You get your confidence and intuition back by trusting yourself, by being militantly on your own side. ... Don't look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.Collection: Inspirational Life
Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there.Collection: Grateful
...[T]here should be a real sense of your imagination and your memories walking and woolgathering, tramping the hills, romping all over the place. Trust them. Don't look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.Collection: Memories
I had NO interest in being a theologian, especially not a Christian, as I had been raised by progressive atheists. We bowed down every morning to the golden calf of the New York Times, Noam Chomsky, Hannah Arendt. I tried to get my parents to respect and nourish me, let alone delight in me, so even though I secretly loved and believed in the Divine Something - Goodness, Good Orderly Direction, Gift of Desperation, the Cosmic Muffin - I wasn't ready yet to commit myself to the study of a higher power.Collection: Christian
I don't see myself as a deep philosopher. The things I write about tend to be what we all have to face, or consider, or experience, that I talk about with my friends and brothers. It's universal stuff, told in my own voice, my own details and truth, which is all I have to offer.Collection: Brother
I find most famous Christians to be full of themselves and of prejudice and self-loathing, masquerading as devout religious belief. I find all fundamentalism to be terrifying and very destructive.Collection: Christian
I believe that discipline and self-love are the total secrets to freedom.Collection: Believe
My dad taught me that to be a writer is a decision and a habit. It's not anything lofty, and it doesn't have that much to do with inspiration. You have to develop the habit of being a certain way with yourself. You do it at the debt of honor.Collection: Dad
I got one of the five golden tickets to be a writer, and I take that seriously. I don't love my own work at all, but I love my own self. I love that I've been given the chance to capture the stories that come through me.Collection: Self
I love silence. I seek and create it at every opportunity. I need it to work.Collection: Opportunity
I can never tell what I'm doing when I'm in the middle of publication because I have no confidence. I have terrible self-esteem, along with boundless narcissism.Collection: Self Esteem
I spend most of my time alone, because I so value and thrive in the quiet. Heaven.Collection: Heaven
I am a terrible and lazy Christian. I do not believe that the Bible is the literal word of God. I just skip about a third of it.Collection: Christian
I do not understand how deeply people seem to like my work - but I love that people feel I have helped them through hardships, and also have shared my experience of living a more spiritual and present life. It's so great to be able to make people laugh, because this is so often how we get our selves back.Collection: Spiritual
I'm very successful, but there are 50,000 general interest books published every year. If you don't want to read mine, there are others.Collection: Book
My family tends to be pretty alcoholic and drug-addicted.Collection: Drug
My experience as a writer is that you really do write seven and eight pages to find the paragraph you were after all along.Collection: Writing
I think drugs are part of the magical possibilities of youth and I wouldn't be here if I had continued with it.Collection: Thinking
If I have a huge audience, I'd like a bigger audience; maybe slightly a slightly more illustrious audience.Collection: Bigger
I have been somebody who has not written a great deal about the truth of my family's life.Collection: My Family
I've always understood that meditation had to be part of - or was part of the natural path and so I've always sort of dabbled in it.Collection: Meditation
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.Collection: Reading
My father really taught me that you really develop the habit of writing and you sit down at the same time every day, you don't wait for inspiration.Collection: Father