Anne Lamott Quotes

In your 20s, you're just a sketch of what you think you're trying to be.

Well, I think that part of being young is not exactly knowing why you do some of the things that you do. And it's by exploring your life or experimenting or making mistakes and learning from them hopefully that you start to forge an identity.

What I am trying to do is create a space for people to explore what they want to be, as opposed to fit into a label that they have been given.

College is a time where a lot of people try to find themselves.

Sometimes you have to wander a bit, and do what you don't want to in order to figure out what it is you're supposed to do.

The most important lesson I've learned is to not limit myself. Kids at my age often get intimidated by the idea of adulthood and feel like they have to know exactly who they are and what they want to do with their lives. I've realized that it's okay to take my time figuring it out and exploring different aspects of myself instead of fixating on one idea of who I am.

And so, I think when I got to college, you discover who you are and find yourself more than you did before.

One of the best ways of understanding human nature is to study children. After all, if we want understand who we are, we should find out how we got to be that way.

Kids have to experiment a little or figure out where they belong.

I'm always thinking about identity. And the middle-school years are a time of exploring questions about who you are and who you want to be. For the first time, you see the world in a broader sense.

I'm trying to be me and embrace all the parts of me that have grown up, listened to more music and soaked up more influences.

I didn't start writing so that I could more deeply know myself. I was bored of myself, my life, my childhood, my hometown. I started writing as a way to know others, to get away from myself.

I think everyone is trying to figure out who they are and their own thing.

I needed to carve out my own place and find out what I was going to do.

As I look back over my life, before I had any real identity, I was a traveler. I grew up an Army brat, a runaway, an activist, and a musician. All my life I've been traveling.

I feel like people expect a lot out of girls, like you're supposed to know who you are and what you want out of life right now. Some girls know. I did. But lots of people don't know. You have to try a lot of things and not worry about what people are thinking.

I'm not sure who I am. That's why I keep saying I'm an adventurer that goes out.

Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.

Music was a means through which I could meet people and sort of begin the process of exploring who I was or who I could be.

As a teenager, you're still discovering who you are, what your life is about, and who you want to be as a person. It's very intense.

A lot of my songs are just posing questions, because I'm on a journey to find the answers myself.

I think that when I started singing, I didn't know what I wanted to do; I only knew what I didn't want to do.

Youth is such a fascinating and volatile concoction of vulnerability, dependence, restlessness, relentlessness. You're still learning the terms of the world and of the self, in a very immediate way.

I knew I had a lot to offer, and it was just about finding my niche and figuring it out.

As a child, I was always getting into risky situations with the potential to hurt myself, but mum and dad never stopped me doing what I wanted to do, and they assumed that if I fell and hurt myself, I would learn from that and maybe not do it again.