How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #10
And the truth of your experience can only come through in your own voice. If it is wrapped in someone else's voice, we readers will feel suspicious, as if you are dressed up in someone else's clothes. You cannot write out of someone else's big dark place; you can only write out of your own. Sometimes wearing someone else's style is very comforting, warm and pretty and bright, and it can loosen you up, tune you into the joys of language and rhythm and concern. But what you say will be an abstraction because it will not have sprung from direct experience: when you try to capture the truth of your experience in some other person's voice or on that person's terms, you are removing yourself one step further from what you have seen and what you know. (26.10)
It's really true: finding something written from a person's actual experience is like the difference between seeing an actor dressed up for a film and seeing an actor in their own clothes. A good actor can be pretty convincing in a costume, but you don't know the real person till you've seen them as they usually are. Especially if they're say, wearing the Bane suit.
Quote #11
Truth, or reality, or whatever you want to call it is the bedrock of life. A black man at my church who is nearing one hundred thundered last Sunday, "God is your home," and I pass this on mostly because all of the interesting characters I've ever worked with—including myself—have had at their center a feeling of otherness, of homesickness. And it's wonderful to watch someone finally open that forbidden door that has kept him or her away. What gets exposed is not people's baseness but their humanity. It turns out that the truth, or reality, is our home. (26.11)
If Lamott is right here, then in a way writers have the task of trying to point us home. When they tell the truth as well as they can, writers are working out their own small map for others to follow home.