Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
By Anne Lamott (1994)
Published by Pantheon Books, New York.

Introduction: Page xix
 "The other kids always wanted me to tell them stories of what had happened, even---or especially--- when they had been there. Parties that got away from us, blowups in the classroom, or on the school yard, scenes involving their parents that we had witnessed---I could make the story happen. I could make it vivid and funny, and even exaggerate some of it so that the event became almost mythical, and the people involved seemed larger, and there was a sense of larger significance, of meaning.

Page 50 (On Narrators)
"They shouldn't be too perfect; perfect means shallow and unreal and fatally uninteresting. I like for them to have a nice sick sense of humour and to be concerned with important things, by which I mean that they are interested in political and psychological and spiritual matters. I want them to want to know who we are and what life is about."

Page 103 (On the Moral Point of View)
"Telling these truths is your job. You have nothing else to tell us. But needless to say, you can't tell them in a sentence or a paragraph; the truth doesn't come out in bumper stickers. There may be a flickering amount 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."

Page 204
"...as Marianne Moore put it "the world's an orphans 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, of communion."

Page 237 (On why Writing Matters)
"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."