Anne Lamott Quotes

What we imagine is order is merely the prevailing form of chaos.

Rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined.

Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.

You need to believe in things that aren't true. How else can they become?

I could get an audience into my world and if you can do that, they'll go with you not all the way, but a lot of the way.

In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story.

The imagination demands that life be told slant because of its need of distance.

The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.

DAISY: I never knew you were such a realist-I thought you were more poetic. Where's your imagination? There are many sides to reality. Choose the one that's best for you. Escape into the world of imagination.

We forget that the world is what we imagine it to be. We stop being the sun and become, instead, the pool of water reflecting it.

My wedding will be a great party where I can get drunk and have a good time.

We're making it up. The world, the universe, life, reality. Especially reality.

Fiction is Truth's elder sister. Obviously. No one in the world knew what truth was till some one had told a story.

The worst thing about film, from my point of view, is that it cripples illusions which I have encouraged people to create in their heads. Film doesn't create illusion. It makes them impossible. It is a bullying form of reality, like the model rooms in the furniture department of Bloomingdale's.

You were just a boy on a bed in a room, like a kaleidoscope is a tube full of bits of broken glass. But the way I saw you was pieces refracting the light, shifting into an infinite universe of flowers and rainbows and insects and planets, magical dividing cells, pictures no one else knew.

Well, I really want to encourage a kind of fantasy, a kind of magic. I love the term magic realism, whoever invented it – I do actually like it because it says certain things. It's about expanding how you see the world. I think we live in an age where we're just hammered, hammered to think this is what the world is. Television's saying, everything's saying 'That's the world.' And it's not the world. The world is a million possible things.

I try in my prints to testify that we live in a beautiful and orderly world, and not in a formless chaos, as it sometimes seems.

Bring something incomprehensible into the world!

Mankind have been slow to believe that order reigns in the universe-that the world is a cosmos and a chaos.

I think we live only through our dreams and our imagination.

When I write new worlds, I work in layers, building and throwing out, and building anew.

For art is order, but it is born out of the chaos of life.

It's certainly true that when I was young, writing seemed to me so important that I would have sacrificed almost anything to it ... Because I thought of the world in which I wrote -- the world I created -- as somehow much more enormously alive than the world I was actually living in.