Quotes from lamott anne iv

You keep working on your piece over and over, trying to get the sections and paragraphs and sentences and the whole just right, but there's a point at which you can tell you've begun hurting the work with your perfectionism. Then you have to release the work to new eyes.

I tell you, it's a brand-new world, it's as radical as having an infant. And I'm as clueless. And it turns out there are no operating instructions and no owner's manual that come with a teenager either.

If you have a problem you can solve by throwing money at it, you don't have a very interesting problem.

I felt alternately rubbery and empty, like sometimes I was landing on the Swiss cheese, sometimes on the holes.

When people have seen you at their worst, you don't have to put on the mask as much.

Slowly, after dozens of rejection slips and failures and false starts and postponed dreams--what Langston Hughes called dreams deferred--I stepped onto the hallowed ground of being a published novelist, and then, fifteen years later, I started to make real money.

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.

What people somehow forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here.