Bird by Bird Quotes

“I remind myself nearly every day of something that a doctor told me six months before my friend Pammy died. This was a doctor who always gave me straight answers. When I called on this one particular night, I was hoping she could put a positive slant on some distressing developments. She couldn't, but she said something that changed my life. "Watch her carefully right now," she said, "because she's teaching you how to live".
I remind myself of this when I cannot get any work done: to live as if I am dying, because the truth is we are all terminal on this bus. To live as if we are dying gives us a chance to experience some real presence.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“Then I look into my students’ faces, and they look solemnly back at me.

“So why does our writing matter, again?” they ask.

Because of the spirit, I say. Because of the heart. Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. 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. It’s like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“I was raised in a culture that promotes this competitiveness, this insatiability, this fantasy of needing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and then, in the next breath, shames you for any feelings of longing or envy or fear that it will always be someone else’s turn. I was only doing what I had been groomed to do.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“Left to its own devices, my mind spends much of its time having conversations with people who aren’t there. I walk along defending myself to people, or exchanging repartee with them, or rationalizing my behavior, or seducing them with gossip, or pretending I’m on their TV talk show or whatever. I speed or run an aging yellow light or don’t come to a full stop, and one nanosecond later am explaining to imaginary cops exactly why I had to do what I did, or insisting that I did not in fact do it.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“When I had been writing food reviews for a number of years, there were so many restaurants and individual dishes in my brainpan that when people asked for a recommendation, I couldn’t think of a single restaurant where I’d ever actually eaten. But if the person could narrow it down to, say, Indian, I might remember one lavish Indian palace, where my date had asked the waiter for the Rudyard Kipling sampler and later for the holy-cow tartare. Then a number of memories would come to mind, of other dates and other Indian restaurants.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“While others who have something to say or who want to be effectual, like musicians or baseball players or politicians, have to get out there in front of people, writers, who tend to be shy, get to stay home and still be public. There are many obvious advantages to this. You don’t have to dress up, for instance, and you can’t hear them boo you right away.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“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, Bird by Bird

“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.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“In this dark and wounded society, writing can give you the pleasures of the woodpecker, of hollowing out a hole in a tree where you can build your nest and say, "This is my niche, this is where I live now, this is where I belong." And the niche may be small and dark, but at last you will finally know what you are doing. After thirty years or more of floundering around and screwing up, you will finally know, and when you get serious you will be dealing with the one thing you've been avoiding all along - your wounds.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“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.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“You are going to have to give and give and give, or there's no reason for you to be writing. You have to give from the deepest part of yourself, and you are going to have to go on giving, and the giving has to be its own reward.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“Vonnegut said, “When I write, I feel like an armless legless man with a crayon in his mouth.” So”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“I don't think you have time to waste not writing because you are afraid you won't be good enough at it, and I don't think you have time to waste on someone who does not respond to you with kindness and respect.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. 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. It’s like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“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, Bird by Bird

“I don't think you have time to waste not writing because you are afraid you won't be good enough at it...”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“Start with your childhood, I tell them. Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard. So”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“The challenge and the dignity make it interesting enough. Besides,”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“In general, though, there’s no point in writing hopeless novels. We all know we’re going to die; what’s important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this. Sometimes”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“Now, you also want to ask yourself how they stand, what they carry in their pockets or purses, what happens in their faces and to their posture when they are thinking, or bored, or afraid. Whom would they have voted for last time? Why should we care about them anyway? What would be the first thing they stopped doing if they found out they had six months to live? Would they start smoking again? Would they keep flossing? You”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“every single one of us at birth is given an emotional acre all our own.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“If you find that you start a number of stories or pieces that you don’t ever bother finishing, that you lose interest or faith in them along the way, it may be that there is nothing at their center about which you care passionately.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“What finally helped was an image from a medieval monk, Brother Lawrence, who saw all of us as trees in winter, with little to give, stripped of leaves and color and growth, whom God loves unconditionally anyway. My priest friend Margaret, who works with the aged and who shared this image with me, wanted me to see that even though these old people are no longer useful in any traditional meaning of the word, they are there to be loved unconditionally, like trees in the winter. When”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“I read a wonderful passage in an interview with Carolyn Chute, the author of The Beans of Egypt, Maine, who was discussing rewriting: “I feel like a lot of time my writing is like having about twenty boxes of Christmas decorations. But no tree. You’re going, Where do I put this? Then they go, Okay, you can have a tree, but we’ll blindfold you and you gotta cut it down with a spoon.” This is how I’ve arrived at my plots a number of times. I would have all these wonderful shiny bulbs, each self-contained with nothing to hang them on. But I would stay with the characters, caring for them, getting to know them better and better, suiting up each morning and working as hard as I could, and somehow, mysteriously, I would come to know what their story was. 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. Some”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“it was about tragedy transformed over the years into joy. It was about the beauty of sheer effort. I”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“Thurber was right when he said, “You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backwards.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life