Quotes by Anne Lamott

One thing about having a baby is that each step of the way you simply cannot imagine loving him any more than you already do, because you are bursting with love, loving as much as you are humanly capable of- and then you do, you love him even more.

To love yourself as you are is a miracle, and to see yourself is to have found yourself, for now. And now is all we have, and love is who we are.

The world is always going to be dangerous, and people get badly banged up, but how can there be more meaning than helping one another stand up in a wind and stay warm?

Grace in the theological sense is that force that infuses our lives, that keeps letting us off the hook.

I sat down in the sand, breathless with shame and failure. God, I thought, some defender of the weak. Some freedom fighter, Joan of Arc in sunscreen.

A grandchild is like a fine jewel set in an old ring.

Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including YOU.

If you asked me, parents were supposed to affect the life of their child in such a way that the child grows up to be responsible, able to participate in life and in community.

I hate the summer.

We stuffed scary feelings down, and they made us insane. I think it is pretty universal, all this repression leading to violence and fundamentalism and self-loathing and addiction.

Sixty feels exactly like 50, with aching feet and more forgetfulness.... But your inside person doesn't age. Your inside person is soul, is heart, in the eternal now, the ageless, the old, the young, all the ages you've ever been.

My mind is a bad neighborhood that I try not to go into alone.

The usual things helped: some distance, prayer, chocolate.

My heart was broken and my head was just barely inhabitable.

Our bottled charm is the main roadblock to drinking that clear cool glass of love.

In biblical times, they used to stone a few thirteen-year-olds with some regularity, which helped keep the others quiet and at home. The mothers were usually in the first row of stone-throwers, and had to be restrained.

For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.

Anything you say from your heart to God is a prayer.

My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I'm grateful for it the way I'm grateful for the ocean.

The three things I cannot change are the past, the truth, and you.

I felt alternately rubbery and empty, like sometimes I was landing on the Swiss cheese, sometimes on the holes.

I tell you, it's a brand-new world, it's as radical as having an infant. And I'm as clueless. And it turns out there are no operating instructions and no owner's manual that come with a teenager either.

What fills us is real, sweet, dopey, funny life.

Kids are hard -- they drive you crazy and break your heart -- whereas grandchildren make you feel great about life, and yourself, and your ability to love someone unconditionally, finally, after all these years.

I'd figured out the gift of failure, which is that it breaks through all that held breath and isometric tension about needing to look good: it's the gift of feeling floppier.

You can get the monkey off your back, but the circus never leaves town.

Writing takes a combination of sophistication and innocence; it takes conscience, our belief that something is beautiful because it is right.

Help, Thanks, Wow.

Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises.

That thing you had to force yourself to do-the actual act of writing-turns out to be the best part.

Prayer usually means praise, or surrender, acknowledging that you have run out of bullets.

The clipping said forgiveness meant that God is for giving, and that we are here for giving too, and that to withold love or blessings is to be completely delusional.

A good marriage is supposed to be one where each spouse secretly thinks he or she got the better deal.

Just don't pretend you know more about your characters than they do, because you don't. Stay open to them. It's teatime and all the dolls are at the table. Listen. It's that simple.

My therapist said starving and dieting are like putting ice cream on a leg wound. I said that ice cream would feel cool and numbing. She said yes and then it would melt.

There is nothing you can buy, achieve, own, or rent that can fill up that hunger inside for a sense of fulfillment and wonder.

Over and over I feel as if my characters know who they are, and what happens to them, and where they have been and where they will go, and what they are capable of doing, but they need me to write it down for them because their handwriting is so bad.

I naturally prefer the company of people who hold grudges, as long as they are not held against me.

I still think they should write with everything they have, daily if possible, and for the rest of their lives.

He lost the great big outward thing, the good- looking package, and the real parts endured. They shine through like crazy, the brillian mind and humor, the depth of generosity, the intense blue yes, those beautiful hands.

There is nothing more touching to me then a family picture where everyone is trying to look his or her best, but you can see what a mess they all really are.

Without using the word, everyone started forgiving each other again. Just like that, from the no of all nothingness: you have a big tense mess and out of it comes some joy. It must be magic.

When I asked Father Tom where we find God in this present darkness, he said that God is in creation, and to get outdoors as much as you can.

Remember that you own what happened to you.

Nothing can be delicious when you are holding your breath.

We stitch together quilts of meaning to keep us warm and safe, with whatever patches of beauty and utility we have on hand.

Mostly what happens in the novels never happened in real life.

See how the fearful chandelier Trembles above you Each time you open your mouth To sing. Sing. --DONALD JUSTICE.

Charles had once remarked that holding onto a resentment was like eating rat poison and waiting for the rat to die.

Where do we even start on the daily walk of restoration and awakening? We start where we are.

First find a path, and a little light to see by. Then push up your sleeves and start helping.

I became a Christian before I got sober. So I was a drunk, bulimic Christian.

In early sobriety I heard that if you have an idea after ten p.m., it is probably not a good idea--and this was before e-mail.

Being sober delivered almost everything drinking promised.

Get to know your characters as well as you can let there be something at stake, and then let the chips fall where they may.

At our most primitive we are storytellers and dancers.

So Rita and I decided that the most subversive, revolutionary thing I could do was to show up for my life and not be ashamed.

Rest and laughter are the most spiritual and subversive acts of all. Laugh, rest, slow down.

The solution is always spiritual, and it almost never has anything to do with the problem ... laughter is carbonated holiness.

Only God can put Scripture inside. But reading sacred text can put it on your hearts, and then when your hearts break, the holy words will fall inside.

One secret of life is that the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day. Another secret is that laughter is carbonated holiness.

That's what's so touching about weddings: Two people fall in love, and decide to see if their love might stand up over time, if there might be enough grace and forgiveness and memory lapses to help the whole shebang hang together.

Perfection is shallow, unreal, and fatally uninteresting.

The evidence is in, and you are the verdict.

You just have to keep getting out of your own way so that whatever it is that wants to be written can use you to write it.

Your inside person doesn't age. Your inside person is soul, is heart, in the eternal now, the ageless, the old, the young, all the ages you've ever been.

And she is going to dance, dance hungry, dance full, dance each cold astonishing moment, now when she is young and again when she is old.

Churches are good for prayer, but so are garages and cars and mountains and showers and dance floors.

'Help' is a prayer that is always answered.

Quiet, deep breath after any prayer is another form of Amen.

For too long, and despite what people told me, I had fallen for what the culture said about beauty, youth, features, heights, weights, hair textures, upper arms.

If you have a body, you are entitled to the full range of feelings. It comes with the package.

Life with most teenagers was like having a low-grade bladder infection. It hurts, but you had to tough it out.

Gratitude, not understanding, is the secret to joy and equanimity.

Looking back on the God my friend believed in, he seems a little erratic, not entirely unlike her father -- God as borderline personality.

You are going to love some of your characters because they are you or some facet of you, and you are going to hate some of your characters for the same reason.

Again and again I tell God I need help, and God says, 'Well, isn't that fabulous? Because I need help too. So you go get that old woman over there some water, and I'll figure out what we're going to do about your stuff.

For me, being a writer is not an altered state. It's very ponderous, and very -- it's like being a shoemaker.

The problem with God -- or at any rate, one of the top five most annoying things about God -- is that he or she rarely answers right away.

I kept asking God for help, and after a while I realized something -- that Josh was not enjoying this either. He was just trying to take care of himself, and I made the radical decision to let him off the hook.

For twenty years I have ached to go back home, when there was nobody there to whom I could return.

You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the rational mind.

For some of us, good books and beautiful writing are our ultimate solace, even more comforting than exquisite food.

You have to make mistakes to find out who you aren't. You take the action, and the insight follows: You don't think your way into becoming yourself.

The mix in our rooms is so touching: the clutter and the cracks in the wall belie a bleakness or brokenness in our lives; while photos and a few rare objects show our pride, our rare shining moments ... these rooms are future ruins.

This is one thing they forget to mention in most child-rearing books, that at times you will just lose your mind. Period.

Everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, and scared, even the people who seem to have it more or less together.

I think this is how we are supposed to be in the world-present and in awe.

Writing is how I communicate my deepest beliefs, and what I hope are helpful observations about our dual citizenship, as children of God, as regular old mixed-up, worried, flawed, precious human beings.

But easy's like, who cares? Easy's like, how much is easy going to get you?

My main problem is that over and over again, I try to get all my characters to say stuff that I think is so witty or erudite you know, so that everybody will go.

Some people wanted to get rich or famous, but my friends and I wanted to get real. We wanted to get deep. (Also, I suppose, we wanted to get laid.).

These are the words I want on my gravestone: that I was a helper, and that I danced.

You know, we're often ashamed of asking for so much help because it seems selfish or petty or narcissistic, but I think, if there's a God -- and I believe there is -- that God is there to help. That's what God's job is.