Bird by Bird Quotes

“And there are also the dogs: let’s not forget the dogs, the dogs in their pen who will surely hurtle and snarl their way out if you ever stop writing, because writing is, for some of us, the latch that keeps the door of the pen closed, keeps those crazy ravenous dogs contained.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“So I’d start writing without reining myself in. It was almost just typing, just making my fingers move. And the writing would be terrible.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“This is not a bad line to have taped to the wall of your office. Say to yourself in the kindest possible way, Look, honey, all we’re going to do for now is to write a description of the river at sunrise, or the young child swimming in the pool at the club, or the first time the man sees the woman he will marry. That is all we are going to do for now. We are just going to take this bird by bird. But we are going to finish this one short assignment.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. 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.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“Not that my mother is not a real person, but whenever I show her a copy of my latest book, she gets sort of quiet and teary, and you can tell that what she’s feeling is “Oh, honey, did you make that yourself?” like it’s my handprint in clay—which I suppose in many ways it is.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“I’m actually quite depressed,” she said. “I don’t see why.” “What’s the silver lining here? I can’t seem to remember today.” “The silver lining is that you’re not going to have to see any more naked pregnant pictures of Demi Moore.” She looked at me for a moment with real wonder. “God,” she said, “that’s a lot—I hadn’t even thought of that.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“You can do it the way you used to clear the dinner dishes when you were thirteen, or you can do it as a Japanese person would perform a tea ceremony, with a level of concentration and care in which you can lose yourself, and so in which you can find yourself.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“It’s like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“I landed a job as a clerk-typist at a huge engineering and construction firm in the city, in the nuclear quality-assurance department, where I labored under a tsunami wave of triplicate forms and memos. It was very upsetting. It was also so boring that it made my eyes feel ringed with dark circles, like Lurch. I finally figured out that most of this paperwork could be tossed without there being any real … well … fallout, and this freed me up to write short stories instead.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“Think of those times when you've read prose or poetry that is presented in such a way that you have a fleeting sense of being startled by beauty or insight, by a glimpse into someone's soul. All of a sudden everything seems to fit together or at least to have some meaning for a moment. This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense of – please forgive me – wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small, bordered worlds.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“Sometimes ritual quiets the racket. Try it. Any number of things may work for you – an altar, for instance, or votive candles, sage smudges, small animal sacrifices, especially now that the Supreme Court has legalised them. (I cut out the headline the day this news came out and taped it above the kitty's water dish.)”
― 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. Flannery O’Connor said that anyone who survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life. Maybe your childhood was grim and horrible, but grim and horrible is Okay if it is well done.”
― 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 lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little. But”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“Having a baby is like suddenly getting the world’s worst roommate, like having Janis Joplin with a bad hangover and PMS come to stay with you.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“Dying people can teach us this most directly. Often the attributes that define them drop away—the hair, the shape, the skills, the cleverness. And then it turns out that the packaging is not who that person has really been all along. Without the package, another sort of beauty shines through.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“Yet somehow in the face of all this, you clear a space for the writing voice, hacking away at the others with machetes, and you begin to compose sentences. You begin to string words together like beads to tell a story. You are desperate to communicate, to edify or entertain, to preserve moments of grace or joy or transcendence, to make real or imagined events come alive. But you cannot will this to happen. It is a matter of persistence and faith and hard work. So you might as well just go ahead and get started.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“Throughout my childhood I believed that what I thought about was different from what other kids thought about. It was not necessarily more profound, but there was a struggle going on inside me to find some sort of creative or spiritual or aesthetic way of seeing the world and organizing it in my head. I read more than other kids; I luxuriated in books. Books were my refuge. I sat in corners with my little finger hooked over my bottom lip, reading, in a trance, lost in the places and times to which books took me.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“Your three-year-old and your work in progress teach you to give. They teach you to get out of yourself and become a person for someone else. This is probably the secret to happiness. So that’s one reason to write. Your child and your work hold you hostage, suck you dry, ruin your sleep, mess with your head, treat you like dirt, and then you discover they’ve given you that gold nugget you were looking for all along.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“Discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“I became a socialist for five weeks, then the bus ride to my socialist meetings wore me out.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“Every couple of years, another book of his was published. Books were revered in our house, and great writers admired above everyone else. Special books got displayed prominently: on the coffee table, on the radio, on the back of the john. I grew up reading the blurbs on dust jackets and the reviews of my father’s books in the papers. All of this made me start wanting to be a writer when I grew up—to be artistic, a free spirit, and yet also to be the rare working-class person in charge of her own life.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“Writing taught my father to pay attention; my father in turn taught other people to pay attention and then to write down their thoughts and observations. His students were the prisoners at San Quentin who took part in the creative-writing program. But he taught me, too, mostly by example. He taught the prisoners and me to put a little bit down on paper every day, and to read all the great books and plays we could get our hands on. He taught us to read poetry. He taught us to be bold and original and to let ourselves make mistakes, and that Thurber was right when he said, “You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backwards.” But while he helped the prisoners and me to discover that we had a lot of feelings and observations and memories and dreams and (God knows) opinions we wanted to share, we all ended up just the tiniest bit resentful when we found the one fly in the ointment: that at some point we had to actually sit down and write.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“Because for some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. 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. They are full of all the things that you don't get in real life-wonderful, lyrical language, for instance, right off the bat. And quality of attention: we may notice amazing details during the course of a day but we rarely let ourselves stop and really pay attention. An author makes you notice, makes you pay attention, and this is a great gift. My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I'm grateful for it the way I'm grateful for the ocean. Aren't you?”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“The core, ethical concepts in which you may passionately believe are the language in which you are writing.
These concepts probably feel like givens, like things no one ever had to make up, that have been true through all cultures and for all time. Telling these truths is your job. You have nothing else to tell us. But needless to say, you cannot tell them in a sentence or a paragraph; the truth doesn't come out in bumper stickers. There may be a flickering moment of insight in a one-liner, in a sound bite, but everyday meat-and-potato truth is beyond our ability to capture in a few words. Your whole piece is the truth, not just one shining epigrammatic moment in it.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“never start a large writing project on any Monday in December. Why set yourself up for failure?”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“I’ve managed to get some work done nearly every day of my adult life, without impressive financial success. Yet I would do it all over again in a hot second, mistakes and doldrums and breakdowns and all. Sometimes I could not tell you exactly why, especially when it feels pointless and pitiful, like Sisyphus with cash-flow problems.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“It’s like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“If it feels natural, if it helps you to remember, take notes. It's not cheating. It doesn't say anything about your character. If your mind is perhaps the merest bit disorganized, it probably just means that you've lost a little ground. It may be all those drugs you took when you were younger, all that nonhabit-forming marijuana that you smoked on a daily basis for twenty years. It may be that you've had children. When a child comes out of your body, it arrives with about a fifth of your brain clutched in its little hand, like those babies born clutching IUDs. So for any number of reasons, it's only fair to let yourself take notes.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“And I don’t think you have that kind of time either. 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. 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.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“I felt
that in my strange new friends and in certain new books, I was meeting my other
half. Some people wanted to get rich or famous, but my friends and I wanted to
get real. We wanted to get deep. (Also, I suppose, we wanted to get laid.) I
devoured books like a person taking vitamins, afraid that otherwise I would
remain this gelatinous narcissist, with no possibility of ever becoming
thoughtful, of ever being taken seriously.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird