Anne Lamott Book Quotations

I try to write the books I would love to come upon that are honest, concerned with real lives, human hearts, spiritual transformation, families, secrets, wonder, craziness - and that can make me laugh.

Being on a book tour is like being on the seesaw when you're a little kid. The excitement is in having someone to play with, and in rising up in the air, but then you're at the mercy of those holding you down, and if it's your older brother, or Paul Wolfowitz, they leap up, so that you crash down and get hurt.

I used to tell my writing students that they must write the books they wished they could come upon - because then the books they hungered and thirsted for would exist.

E-books are great for instant gratification - you see a review somewhere of a book that interests you, and you can start reading it five minutes later.

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.

Some people may have thought that this book was too personal, too confessional. But what these people think about me is none of my business.

For some of us, good books and beautiful writing are our ultimate solace, even more comforting than exquisite food.

We were raised to believe in books, music, and nature.

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.

And we've read scary books and watched scary movies and TV shows together. He's met monsters, ghouls, and demons on the page and on the screen. There's nothing like watching Anaconda with your best friend or lying in bed next to your mother reading Roald Dahl, because that way you get to explore dark stuff safely. You get to laugh with it, to step out on the vampire's dance floor and take him for a spin, and then step back into your life. When you make friends with fear, it can't rule you.

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.

Two things put me in the spirit to give. One is that I have come to think of everyone with whom I come into contast as a patient in the emergency room. I see a lot of gaping wounds and dazed expressions. Or, as Marianne Moore put it, "The world's an orphan's home." And this feels more true than almost anything else I know. But so many of us can be soothed by writing: think of how many times you have opened a book, read one line, and said, "Yes!" And I want to give people that feeling, too, of connection, communication.

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 ...

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.

This is one thing they forget to mention in most child-rearing books, that at times you will just lose your mind. Period.

Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report written on birds that he'd had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books about birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, "Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.

Human lives are hard, even those of health and privilege, and don't make much sense. This is the message of the Book of Job: Any snappy explanation of suffering you come up with will be horseshit.