## Metadata - Author: [[Anne Lamott]] - Full Title: Bird by Bird - Category: #books ## Highlights - I understood immediately the thrill of seeing oneself in print. It provides some sort of primal verification: you are in print; therefore you exist. Who knows what this urge is all about, to appear somewhere outside yourself, instead of feeling stuck inside your muddled but stroboscopic mind, peering out like a little undersea animal—a spiny blenny, for instance—from inside your tiny cave? Seeing yourself in print is such an amazing concept: you can get so much attention without having to actually show up somewhere. ([Location 94](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEGI8Q&location=94)) - when my writer friends are working, they feel better and more alive than they do at any other time. And sometimes when they are writing well, they feel that they are living up to something. It is as if the right words, the true words, are already inside them, and they just want to help them get out. ([Location 295](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEGI8Q&location=295)) - becoming a better writer is going to help you become a better reader, and that is the real payoff. ([Location 390](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEGI8Q&location=390)) - There is a door we all want to walk through, and writing can help you find it and open it. Writing can give you what having a baby can give you: it can get you to start paying attention, can help you soften, can wake you up. ([Location 441](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEGI8Q&location=441)) - Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor, because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong. It is no wonder if we sometimes tend to take ourselves perhaps a bit too seriously. ([Location 506](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEGI8Q&location=506)) - A man I know once said to me, “The evidence is in, and you are the verdict.” ([Location 783](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEGI8Q&location=783)) - Think of the basket of each character’s life: what holds the ectoplasm together—what are this person’s routines, beliefs? What little things would your characters write in their journals: I ate this, I hate that, I did this, I took the dog for a long walk, I chatted with my neighbor. This is all the stuff that tethers them to the earth and to other people, all the stuff that makes each character think that life sort of makes sense. The basket is an apt image because of all the holes. How aware is each character of how flimsy the basket really is? ([Location 806](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEGI8Q&location=806))