Anne Lamott Quotes

You are at the same time arrogant and self-loathing. You are a puzzle. But the ancient truth remains: as the light grows dimmer, things begin to become harder to see. I came to love you in time, but I feared the dark side as well. I still do. You have tremendous potential, potential for joy or hate, light or dark, life or death. But in the end, you choose. What a gift, what a joy to witness.

I now know myself to be a person of weakness and strength, liability and giftedness, darkness and light. I now know that to be whole means to reject none of it but to embrace all of it.

It's not easy to be Light when you've been Dark. It's almost too much to ask anyone. -Macon Ravenwood

Somewhere deep down there's a decent man in me, he just can't be found.

We fear to know the fearsome and unsavory aspects of ourselves, but we fear even more to know the godlike in ourselves.

We're all moons. Sometimes our dark sides overshadow our light.

If thou has not seen the devil, look at thine own self.

You must be willing to examine and explore your dark side. You must acknowledge how bad you can be and how horribly unloving you can behave. When you know how deep and dark your dark side is, it helps you stand a little taller in the light.

The dictate of the light says: Know yourself and what you are. The dark replies, By all means, but then become afraid.

In civilized societies, we spend our lifetimes trying to become what is socially acceptable. We're dark and we're light. We all have both sides to us.

Clear to me at last that the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality my most

You do come to a point where you can get your life in control a bit. But going through life, you discover these deep, dark things in yourself that you can’t run away from, so you have to learn to embrace them. I mean, the difference between a murderer and myself is only that I choose not to do it. But I’m capable.

The bigger confrontation is the one an individual has with itself.

Everybody has a lot of darkness in them because without that you're not a whole person.

So many people go through life, and they never deal with their own issues, no matter what the issues are - ours happen to be gender identity. But, how many people go through life and just waste an entire life 'cause they'd never deal with themselves to be who they are.

Basically, we are a whole world of people desperately trying to figure out what is the dark side of our natures and how much can we explore without becoming something else.

I would say that playing this character has caused me to think about a lot of things. He's always questioning himself and trying to get back to something he lost touch with and trying to find forgiveness. Everybody struggles with these things to some extent in their life.

When I read profiles of myself, I sometimes think: 'I have spent my whole life struggling to understand my motivations and impulses, and I've never quite sorted them out.'

I have never seen a greater monster or miracle in the world than myself.

Every man is crucified upon the cross of himself.

A man's conflicts represent what he 'really' is.

Everyone on the planet has a dark and a light. That's a multi-dimensional character.

Being a full human being is difficult, frightening, and problematical.

A man is sometimes as different from himself as he is from others.

You can't escape from yourself, can you?