Anne Born Quotes & Sayings

We begin to find and become ourselves when we notice how we are already found, already truly, entirely, wildly, messily, marvelously who we were born to be. — Anne Lamott

I'm speaking of the character of human beings, not what they believe in. I'm speaking of those who won't accept a useless life just because they were born to it. I mean those who would be something better. They work, they sacrifice, they do things ... "
He was moved by this, and I was a little surprised that I'd said it. Yet I felt I'd had hurt him somehow.
"There is blessedness in that." I said. "There's sanctity. And God or no God, there is goodness in it. I know this the way I know the mountains are out there, that the stars shine. — Anne Rice

Once upon a time we were all born,
popped out like jelly rolls
forgetting our fishdom,
the pleasuring seas,
the country of comfort,
spanked into the oxygens of death ... — Anne Sexton

I was born to be your rival,' she [Anne] said simply. 'And you mine. We're sisters, aren't we? — Philippa Gregory

I'll show then that Anne Frank wasn't born yesterday — Anne Frank

I mean it's a concept born out of moral idiocy, this idea of love! — Anne Rice

I also learned that you didn't come onto this earth as a perfectionist or control freak. You weren't born a person of cringe and contraction. You were born as energy, as life, made of the same stuff as stars, blossoms, breezes. You learned contraction to survive, but that was then. You have paid through the nose-paid but good. It is now your turn to reap. — Anne Lamott

Women are born twice. — Anne Sexton

Well, I am no village cunning woman, no frightened merry-begot, but a woman born to riches, and
educated from the time I can remember, and given all that I could possibly desire. And now in my
twenty-second year, already a mother and soon perhaps to be a widow, I rule in this place. I ruled
before my mother gave to me all her secrets, and her great familiar, Lasher, and I mean to study this
thing, and make use of it, and allow it to enhance my considerable strength. — Anne Rice

I was born with the impression that what happened in books was much for reasonable, and interesting, and real, in some ways, than what happened in life. — Anne Tyler

She mulled how very Jonathan of him to effortlessly find his way to her when she needed him, labyrinth or no. Just as he'd effortlessly uncovered her secrets. But that was simply because he'd been born knowing the secret to her. He was hers and she was his. Just as there was one key for every lock — Julie Anne Long

I'm Alabama-born, so a transplant here - but I think I could enjoy growing some roots. — Therese Anne Fowler

Sometimes superheroes are born, sometimes they are made. Sometimes they make themselves. Sometimes all it takes is will. — Anne Ursu

... Like most youngest children, he had trouble remembering his own past. The older ones did it so well for him, why should he bother? They had built him a second-hand memory that included the years before he existed, even. He had a distinct memory of Melissa's running away from home with a peanut sandwich and a pomegranate, two years before he was born; but he himself, with his locust on a leash, had vanished.
-- pg 273-74 — Anne Tyler

While at Oxford in 1999, I met Jonathan Fortier, who is a Montreal-born Canadian. Despite the challenges of a transatlantic relationship, we remained keen on each other and eventually married in 2002. — Anne Fortier

The best thing about coming out is, it's totally liberating. You feel like you've made this incredible discovery about yourself and you want to share it and be open and honest and not spend all your time wondering how is this person going to react, or should I be careful around this person, or what will the neighbors say? And it's more. It's about getting past the question of what's wrong with me, to knowing there's nothing wrong, that you were born this way. You're a normal person and a beautiful person and you should be proud of who you are. You deserve to live with dignity and show people your pride. — Julie Anne Peters

Let me learn now where Beauty is;
I was born to know her mysteries ... — Anne Spencer

I'd like to add some beauty to life," said Anne dreamily. "I don't exactly want to make people KNOW more ... though I know that IS the noblest ambition ... but I'd love to make them have a pleasanter time because of me ... to have some little joy or happy thought that would never have existed if I hadn't been born. — L.M. Montgomery

She has the strength, the knowledge, and the desire. She'll bring him out of the Twisted Kingdom." It wasn't what Lucivar meant, and they both knew it.
"Why didn't you stop her? Why are you letting her risk herself?"
Saetan bent his head, avoiding Lucivar's eyes. "Because she loves him. Because he really is her mate."
Lucivar was silent for a minute. Then he sighed. "He always said he'd been born to be Witch's lover. Looks like he was right. — Anne Bishop

When the cow gives blood
and the Christ is born
we must all eat sacrifices.
We must all eat beautiful women. — Anne Sexton

It's rather hard to decide just when people are grown up,' laughed Anne.
'That's a true word, dearie. Some are grown up when they're born, and others ain't grown up when they're eighty, believe me. That same Mrs. Roderick I was speaking of never grew up. She was as foolish when she was hundred as when she was ten.'
'Perhaps that was why she lived so long,' suggested Anne. — L.M. Montgomery

Was just, seems like, born knowing how. He can figure — Anne Tyler

I was born in Belgium on 6 November 1932. I am married to Mira Nikomarow and have five children: Michele, Anne, Georges, from a first marriage with Esther Dujardin, and Sarah, Helene from a second one with Danielle Vindal. — Francois Englert

Rejoice with the day lily for it is born for a day to live by the mailbox and glorify the roadside — Anne Sexton

Why are all these dolls falling out of the sky?
Was there a father?
Or have the planets cut holes in their nets
and let our childhood out,
or are we the dolls themselves,
born but never fed? — Anne Sexton

Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns. Faith also means reaching deeply within, for the sense one was born with, the sense, for example, to go for a walk. — Anne Lamott

And she was...what? A governess? A false governess whose life history began in 1816 when she'd stepped off the ferry, seasick and petrified, and placed her feet on the rocky soil of the Isle of Man.
Anne Wynter had been born that day, and Annelise Shawcross...
She had disappeared. Gone in a puff like the spray of the ocean all around her. — Julia Quinn

But as Rumi said, "Through love all pain will turn to medicine," not most pain, or for other people; and the pain and failures grew me, helped slowly restore me to the person I was born to be. I had to learn that life was not going to be filling if I tried to scrunch myself into somebody else's idea of me, i.e., someone sophisticated enough to prefer dark chocolate. I like milk chocolate, like M&M's: so sue me. But I no longer have to stuff myself to the gills. — Anne Lamott

When everything starts going wrong all at once, it is to protect something big and lovely that is trying to get itself born. — Anne Lamott

Anne-Marie Costallat, born October 8, 1944. I was beginning high school and masturbating twice a day, curling over it like a dead leaf, when she was born, in a bed of violets, as she says - all French mothers tell their children that. — James Salter

And do stop trying to determine if I am a man or a woman. The fact is I'm a good part both and therefore neither one. I was just explaining to your Aunt Queen. I was born endowed with the finest traits of both sexes and I drift this way and that as I choose. — Anne Rice

And there was something different in his manner as well, a confidence born of intellect, not status or power. Curious how such fractional things, the angle of a head, a furrow between the brows, a hesitation, a measuring as if of a potential threat, could give away a man's origins even before he spoke. — Anne Perry

I shouldn't have been there. I should never have been born. — Julie Anne Peters

When I'm writing, I know I'm doing the thing I was born to do. — Anne Sexton

I don't have much in the way of money or worldly possessions, I'm not beautiful, intelligent or clever, but I'm happy, and I intend to stay that way! I was born happy, I love people, I have a trusting nature, and I'd like everyone else to be happy too. — Anne Frank

If it's all connected, I don't like it," I muttered. "All this is too apocalyptic," I said. "I can live with the notion that this world is a Savage Garden, that things are born and die for random reasons, that suffering is irrelevant to the great brutal cycle of life. I can live with all that. But I don't think I can live with great overarching connections — Anne Rice

Human greatness does not lie in wealth or power, but in character and goodness. People are just people, and all people have faults and shortcomings, but all of us are born with a basic goodness. — Anne Frank

When I lie down to love,
old dwarf heart shakes her head.
Like an imbecile she was born old. — Anne Sexton

There have been many times when I have been so entirely sickened of life it was very hard to work to keep on, a half dozen times I have been tempted to suicide, but I am glad I did not give way, for I have always felt that the last half of my life would somehow atone for the first half, and I still think it may ... It is not possible to live in this world without suffering unless one is a born stone. But it is also possible to have a great deal of happiness in spite of the suffering. — Katherine Anne Porter

My father was born in Amsterdam in a highly religious family. He was in Amsterdam, and he went into hiding right near where Anne Frank was. He was a theoretical physicist and the last Jew to get a Ph.D. in Amsterdam. — Josh Pais

Men who hit are spineless and low to the ground. Hence, The Worm Fiasco, was born. — Carrie-Anne O'Driscoll

But family... family is something you guard. Sometimes you are born to that family, and sometimes you create it, one connection at a time — Anne Zoelle

[I]t was in the pairs that the prisoners kept alive the semblance of humanity concluded Elmer Luchterhand, a sociologist at Yale who interviewed fifty-two concentration camp survivors shortly after liberation.
Pairs stole food and clothing for each other, exchanged small gifts and planned for the future. If one member of a pair fainted from hunger in front of an SS officer, the other would prop him up.
Survival ... could only be a social achievement, not an individual accident, wrote Eugene Weinstock, a Belgian resistance fighter and Hungarian-born Jew who was sent to Buchenwald in 1943.
Finally the death of one member of a pair often doomed the other. Women who knew Anne Frank in the Bergen-Belsen camp said that neither hunger nor typhus killed the young girl who would become the most famous diarist of the Nazi era. Rather, they said, she lost the will to live after the death of her sister, Margot. — Blaine Harden

All suffering has an end, David, if only you wait long enough. Sorrow has its life like people. Sorrow is born and lives and dies. And when it's dead and gone, someone's left behind to remember it. Exactly like people. — Anne Holm

How infuriating it is to be continually born to war that continues one's whole lifetime, even as one protests it - what futility. It is perhaps a more public epic in this regard, and carries a ritual vocalization. — Anne Waldman

I believe nothing, and therefore like many who believe nothing, I must make something, and that something is the meaning which I give to my life. The saving of witches, the study of the supernatural, these are my lasting pleasures; they make me forget that I do not know why we are born, or why we die, or why the world is here. — Anne Rice

To be born into this world exactly the way it is, into these exact circumstances, even if that meant not having a dad or an ozone layer, even if it included pets that would die and acne and seventh=grade dances and AIDS. — Anne Lamott

I wish I could ask God to give
me another personality, one that doesn't antagonize everyone. But that's impossible. I'm stuck with the character I was born with, and yet I'm sure I'm not a bad person. I do my best to please everyone, more than they'd ever suspect in a million years. When I'm upstairs, I try to laugh it off because I don't want them to see my troubles. — Anne Frank

My nightly craft is winged in white, a dragon of night dark sea.
Swift born, dream bound and rudderless, her captain and crew are me.
We've sailed a hundred sleeping tides where no seaman's ever been
And only my white-winged craft and I know the wonders we have seen. — Anne McCaffrey

Giulietta pressed the letter against her heart. I know what you are thinking. You wish to protect me ... And you think Romeo will cause me pain. Great love, you believe, carries the seeds of great sorrow. Well, perhaps you are right ... but I should rather choose to have my eyes burnt in their sockets than to have been born without. — Anne Fortier

"I was born in the US and l have lived in Mexico since 1946. I believe that all these states of being have influenced my work and made it what you see today. I am inspired by Black people and Mexican people, my two peoples. My art speaks for both my peoples" ~ Elizabeth Catlett — Melanie Anne Herzog

I was born doing reference work in sin, and born
confessing it. This is what poems are. — Anne Sexton

When my sister and I came along, my father's political life was completely over. He ran for president the year I was born. So that was the end of it. He had been congressman first, then governor, before all that. So when we came along, he was running the Dayton newspaper. — Anne Cox Chambers

Somebody who should have been born
is gone.
Yes, woman, such logic will lead
to loss without death. Or say what you meant,
you coward ... this baby that I bleed. — Anne Sexton

But no one will weep for me or for them. They have been buried, nameless, beneath five centuries of time.
I am a vampire.
My name is Vittorio, and I write this now in the tallest tower of the ruined mountaintop castle in which I was born, in the northernmost part of Tuscany, that most beautiful of lands in the very center of Italy. — Anne Rice

At that time I was too young for some of the troubles I was having, and I had not yet learned what to do with them. It no longer can matter what kind of troubles they were, or what finally became of them, though all my tradition, background, and training had taught me unanswerably that no one except a coward ever runs away from anything. What nonsense! They should have taught me the difference between courage and foolhardiness, instead of leaving me to find it out for myself. I learned finally that if I still had the sense I was born with, I would take off like a deer at the first warning of certain dangers. — Katherine Anne Porter

Ah! I shall repeat it endlessly, the only misfortune is to be born! — Marie Anne De Vichy-Chamrond, Marquise Du Deffand

It turned out this man worked for the Dalai Lama. And she said gently-that they believe when a lot of things start going wrong all at once, it is to protect something big and lovely that is trying to get itself born-and that this something needs for you to be distracted so that it can be born as perfectly as possible. — Anne Lamott

She wouldn't look up at him, wouldn't take her hands from her eyes; she didn't want him to see her. So he wrapped his arms around her like armor, making a shelter for her to fall apart ... He surreptitiously rested his cheek against the top of her head. That rich hair was too silky and fine and warm, and her narrow pale part seemed ridiculously pale and vulnerable as a fontanelle. Here, it seemed to say, was proof that Thomasina de Ballesteros could be broken. Cracked like an egg. That she was human.
The rage he felt then toward the duke was almost euphoric. Almost holy.
This is how crusades are born, he thought. With this kind of certainty about right and wrong, good and evil, and the need to avenge. — Julie Anne Long

It doesn't seem FAIR, said Anne rebelliously. Babies are born and live where they are not wanted-where they will be neglected-where they have no chance. I would have loved my baby so-and cared for it tenderly-and tried to give her every chance for good. And yet I wasn't allowed to keep her. — L.M. Montgomery

In the sheltered simplicity of the first days after a baby is born, one sees again the magical closed circle, the miraculous sense of two people existing only for each other. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

I quit my last real job, as a writer at a magazine, when I was twenty-one. That was the moment when I lost my place of prestige on the fast track, and slowly, millimeter by millimeter, I started to get found, to discover who I had been born to be, instead of the impossibly small package, all tied up tightly in myself, that I had agreed to be. That — Anne Lamott

What a splendid day!' said Anne, drawing a long breath. 'Isn't it good just to be alive on a day like this? I pity the people who aren't born yet for missing it. They may have good days, of course, but they can never have this one. — L.M. Montgomery

She was young, healthy, stronger than she'd ever been. And she was in love with him. She'd fallen in love with a man who challenged the world to take him on, sometimes with laughing, boyish enthusiasm and other times as a warrior born and trained to kill. She could do this for him. Would do this for him. — Anne Bishop

That I was born to this circle - I am blessed. That I choose to stand in this circle - I am proud. — Mary Anne Radmacher

Though Anne was born in Alabama and schooled in Mississippi, she had traveled North, and, like many Southerners, gained a theoretical understanding of the concept of cold. But the mind is an overprotective parent. What it doesn't care for, it hides. Like many inhabiting the subtropics, Anne had repressed the reality of subzero mercury. — Kathy Reichs

Even from the darkest night songs of beauty can be born. — Mary Anne Radmacher

What if you wake up at sixty and realize that you forgot to wake up, and you never became the person you were born to be, and now your hair is falling out? — Anne Lamott

I was born in London, England, in 1938, a few months before the war, and spent the first years of my life there, although I was evacuated a couple of times for short periods. My schooling was very interrupted, both by frequent moves and by ill health. — Anne Perry

Everyone is born equal; we will all die and shed our earthly glory. Riches, power and fame last for only a few short years. Why do we cling so desperately to these fleeting things? Why can't people who have more than enough for their own needs give the rest to their fellow human beings? Why should anyone have to have such a hard life for those few short years on earth? — Anne Frank

I think of my father born in this very small, limited situation and then coming out of that. Many people have this story. — Anne Waldman

My sister learned she was a carrier for a recessive disease, Bloom syndrome, late in one of her pregnancies. I remember the panicked call and the weeks of worry as she and her husband awaited his test results; if he was also a carrier, this meant their daughter had a one in four chance of being born with the disorder. — Anne Wojcicki

Everyone is born equal; we all come into the world helpless and innocent. We all breathe the same air, and many of us believe in the same God. And yet ... and yet, to many people this one small difference is a huge one! It's huge because many people have never realized what the difference is, for if they had they would have discovered long ago that there's actually no difference at all! — Anne Frank

I had a student some years ago whose father had worked on the Manhattan Project. I had a student who had to escape this very intense, born-again fundamentalist Christian background that was very much like a cult and of course they struggle to get to Naropa. And they have cut themselves off. They don't look back. — Anne Waldman

When my parents were liberated, four years before I was born, they found that the ordinary world outside the camp had been eradicated. There was no more simple meal, no thing was less than extraordinary: a fork, a mattress, a clean shirt, a book. Not to mention such things that can make one weep: an orange, meat and vegetables, hot water. There was no ordinariness to return to, no refuge from the blinding potency of things, an apple screaming its sweet juice. — Anne Michaels

We are born knowing death. — Katherine Anne Porter

Oh, I don't mind his being wicked: he's all the better for that; and as for disliking him - I shouldn't greatly object to being Lady Ashby of Ashby Park, if I must marry. But if I could be always young, I would be always single. I should like to enjoy myself thoroughly, and coquet with all the world, till I am on the verge of being called an old maid; and then, to escape the infamy of that, after having made ten thousand conquests, to break all their hearts save one, by marrying some high-born, rich, indulgent husband, whom, on the other hand, fifty ladies were dying to have.'

'Well, as long as you entertain these views, keep single by all means, and never marry at all: not even to escape the infamy of old-maidenhood. — Anne Bronte

You are going to feel like hell if you never write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves in your heart
your stories, visions, memories, songs: your truth, your version of things, in your voice. That is really all you have to offer us, and it's why you were born. — Anne Lamott

It gets darker and darker, and then Jesus is born. That line came back to me, from out of nowhere, and I decided to practice radical hope, hope in the face of not having a clue. — Anne Lamott

No one is born just once. If you're lucky, you'll emerge again in someone's arms; or unlucky, wake when the long tail of terror brushes the inside of your skull. — Anne Michaels

When my baby was born, I felt like somebody had spiked my drink, and I suddenly was so full of love that it was a little bit as if I was drugged. I didn't think that anyone could feel that way. — Anne-Marie Duff

Maybe we're born with a full set of qualities, some fine, some not so fine, and none of us knows what will bring out everything that lives within us. And sometimes it's the fine qualities that cause us trouble, and the not so fine that save us. — Julie Anne Long

I am an Aries. Although I do not believe in astrology, I think this is exactly the right sign to have been born under. — Anne Lamott