Anne Lamott Quotes About Feelings

Quotes about: Feelings

• The problem is acceptance, which is something we're taught not to do. We're taught to improve uncomfortable situations, to change things, alleviate unpleasant feelings. But if you accept the reality that you have been given- that you are not in a productive creative period- you free yourself to begin filling up again.

  Anne Lamott

  Acceptance, Reality, Uncomfortable Situations

  Anne Lamott (2007). “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life”, p.178, Anchor

• If you have a body, you are entitled to the full range of feelings. It comes with the package.

  Anne Lamott

  Feelings, Body, Range

  Anne Lamott (2008). “Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith”, p.74, Penguin

• The depth of the feeling continued to surprise and threaten me, but each time it hit again and I bore it...I would discover that it hadn't washed me away.

  Anne Lamott

  Feelings, Depth, Surprise

• 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.

  Anne Lamott

  Book, Communication, Home

• Most of me was glad when my mother died. She was a handful, but not in a cute, festive way. More in a life-threatening way, that had caused me a long time ago to give up all hope of ever feeling good about having had her as a mother.

  Anne Lamott

  Cute, Mother, Giving Up

• The last song was so deep and raw and pure that I could not escape. It was as if the people were singing in between the notes, weeping and joyful at the same time, and I felt like their voices or something was rocking me in its bosom, holding me like a scared kid, and I opened up to that feeling-and it washed over me.

  Anne Lamott

  Song, Kids, Voice

  Anne Lamott (2000). “Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith”, p.49, Anchor

• I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said that you can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.)

  Anne Lamott

  Hate, Writing, Thinking

  "Bird by Bird". Book by Anne Lamott, 1994.

• God sent Jesus to join the human experience, which means to make a lot of mistakes. Jesus didn't arrive here knowing how to walk. He had fingers and toes, confusion, sexual feelings, crazy human internal processes. He had the same prejudices as the rest of his tribe: he had to learn that the Canaanite woman was a person. He had to suffer the hardships and tedium and setbacks of being a regular person. If he hadn't the incarnation would mean nothing.

  Anne Lamott

  Jesus, Crazy, Mistake

  Anne Lamott (2008). “Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith”, p.101, Penguin

• 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.

  Anne Lamott

  Break Through, Feelings, Looks

  Anne Lamott (2000). “Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith”, Anchor

• Don’t underestimate this gift of finding a place in the writing world: if you really work at describing creatively on paper the truth as you understand it, as you have experienced it, with the people or material who are in you, who are asking that you help them get written, you will come to a secret feeling of honor.

  Anne Lamott

  Writing, People, Feelings

• There are moments when I am writing when I think that if other people knew how I felt right now, they’d burn me at the stake for feeling so good, so full, so much intense pleasure.

  Anne Lamott

  Writing, Thinking, People

  Anne Lamott (2007). “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life”, p.233, Anchor

• Most people's intuitions are drowned out by folk sayings. We have a moment of real feeling or insight, and then we come up with a folk saying that captures the insight in a kind of wash. The intuition may be real and ripe, fresh with possibilities, but the folk saying is guaranteed to be a cliche, stale and self-contained.

  Anne Lamott

  Real, Self, People

  Anne Lamott (2007). “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life”, p.113, Anchor

• My writer friends, and they are legion, do not go around beaming with quiet feelings of contentment. Most of them go around with haunted, abused, surprised looks on their faces, like lab dogs on whom very personal deodorant sprays have been tested.

  Anne Lamott

  Dog, Feelings, Contentment

  Anne Lamott (2007). “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life”, p.30, Anchor

• I was raised in a family where none of us ever raised a voice, so there was no room to express feelings of rage or even unabashed joy - a little bashed joy, here or there, or being mildly disgruntled.

  Anne Lamott

  Voice, Joy, Feelings

• I woke up full of hate and fear the day before the most recent peace march in San Francisco. This was disappointing: I'd hoped to wake up feeling somewhere between Virginia Woolf and Wavy Gravy.

  Anne Lamott

  Hate, Virginia, San Francisco

• Grief is just so scary.... If we finally begin to cry all those suppressed tears, they will surely wash us away like the Mississippi River. That's what our parents told us. We got sent to our rooms for having huge feelings. In my family, if you cried or got angry, you didn't get dinner.

  Anne Lamott

  Grief, Rivers, Parent

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