Quotes by Anne Lamott
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To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass.

What an incredible drug fear is.

Toddlers can make you feel as if you have violated some archaic law in their personal Koran and you should die, infidel.

After a few days at the desk, telling the truth in an interesting way turns out to be as easy and pleasurable as bathing a cat.

Learning to love back is the hardest part of being alive.

When you're kind to people, and you pay attention, you make a field of comfort around them, and you get it back--the Golden Rule meets the Law of Karma meets Murphy's Law.

Sam said to me the other day, I love you like 20 tyrannosauruses on 20 mountaintops, and this is the exact same way in which I love him.

After a while the middle-aged person who lives in her head begins to talk to her soul, the kid.

Good writing is about telling the truth.

I don't write about the intimate details of my cousins and aunts and uncles, and my mother and my father because it's not right to, for me.

When I was young, I used to be so jealous of other girls that it crippled me.

I could become like that dyslexic agnostic in the old joke -- the one who lies in bed and tries to figure out if his dog exists.

In fact, not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die.

Only grieving can heal grief; the passage of time will lessen the acuteness, but time alone, without the direct experience of grief, will not heal it.

Grief, as I read somewhere once, is a lazy Susan. One day it is heavy and underwater, and the next day it spins and stops at loud and rageful, and the next day at wounded keening, and the next day numbness, silence.

This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense of -- please forgive me -- wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small, bordered worlds.

I've seen prayers answered. But often, in my experiences, if you get what you pray for, you've really shortchanged yourself.

And as it turns out, if one person is praying for you, buckle up. Things can happen.

If I were going to begin practicing the presence of God for the first time today, it would help to begin by admitting the three most terrible truths of our existence: that we are so ruined, and so loved, and in charge of so little.

Her purse was a weight, ballast; it tethered her to the earth as her mind floated away.

There are a lot of us, some published, some not, who think the literary life is the loveliest one possible, this life of reading and writing and corresponding. We think this life is nearly ideal.

You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander.

You know how I always say that laughter is carbonated holiness? Well, Robin was the ultimate proof of that, and bubbles are spirit made visible.

The best thing about being an artist, instead of a madman or someone who writes letters to the editor, is that you get to engage in satisfying work. Even if you never publish a word, you have something important to pour yourself into.

Sometimes grace is a ribbon of mountain air that gets in through the cracks.

Trying to reason with an addict was like trying to blow out a lightbulb.

I do know the sorrow of being ordinary, and that much of our life is spent doing the crazy mental arithmetic of how, at any given moment, we might improve, or at least disguise or present our defects and screw-ups in either more charming or more intimidating ways.

I love silence. I seek and create it at every opportunity. I need it to work.

The movement of grace toward gratitude brings us from the package of self-obsessed madness to a spiritual awakening.

It really IS easier to experience spiritual connection when your life is in the process of coming apart.

Grace arrived, like the big, loopy stitches with which a grandmotherly stranger might baste your hem temporarily.

Butterflies and birds are like one perfect teaspoon of creation.

The reason 'help' is such a great prayer is that God is the gift of desperation. When you're in despair, you're teachable.

Music is about as physical as it gets: your essential rhythm is your heartbeat; your essential sound, the breath. We're walking temples of noise, and when you add tender hearts to this mix, it somehow lets us meet in places we couldn't get to any other way.

He got me a cup of tea with honey, toast with honey, yogurt with honey, like I was John the Baptist with the flu.

When faced with a crisis, do three things: breathe, pray and be kind.

Creative expression, whether that means writing, dancing, bird-watching, or cooking, can give a person almost everything that he or she has been searching for: enlivenment, peace, meaning, and the incalculable wealth of time spent quietly in beauty.

I did not raise my son, Sam, to celebrate Mother's Day. I didn't want him to feel some obligation to buy me pricey lunches or flowers, some annual display of gratitude that you have to grit your teeth and endure.

If you want to make God laugh, tell her your plans.

It's good to do uncomfortable things. It's weight training for life.

Expectations are resentments under construction.

But grace can be the experience of a second wind, when even though what you want is clarity and resolution, what you get is stamina and poignancy and the strength to hang on.

I was reminded of the Four Immutable Laws of the Spirit: Whoever is present are the right people. Whenever it begins is the right time. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened. And when it's over, it's over.

What people somehow forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here.

Butterflies were wind energy made visible.

Writing is about hypnotizing yourself into believing in yourself, getting some work done, then unhypnotizing yourself and going over the material coldly.

Life is not a submarine.

My father was a writer, so I grew up writing and reading and I was really encouraged by him.

Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.

Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.

Raising a child, whether or not it is yours, is like Nautilus of the heart and soul.

Rationality squeezes out much that is rich and juicy and fascinating.

You should not bring more items and hurdles to the obstacle course.

We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason why they write so little.

You simply keep putting down one damn word after the other, as you hear them, as they come to you. You can either set brick as a laborer or as an artist.

My writer friends, and they are legion, do not go around beaming with quiet feelings of contentment. Most of them go around with haunted, abused, surprised looks on their faces, like lab dogs on whom very personal deodorant sprays have been tested.

Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns.

If you fixate on the big picture, the whole shebang, the overview, you miss the stitching.

I get to tell my truth. I get to seek meaning and realization. I get to live fully, wildly, imperfectly. That's why I'm alive. And all I actually have to offer as a writer is my version of life. Every single thing that has happened to me is mine.

Clutter and mess show us that life is being lived.

To be a good writer, you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care. You do not have to have a complicated moral philosophy. But a writer always tries, I think, to be a part of a solution, to understand a little about life and to pass this on.

Mine was a patchwork God, sewn together from bits of rag and ribbon, Eastern and Western, pagan and Hebrew, everything but the kitchen sink and Jesus.

I am learning slowly to bring my crazy pinball-machine mind back to this place.

You are not your bank account, or your ambitiousness. You're not the cold clay lump with a big belly you leave behind when you die. You're not your collection of walking personality disorders. You are spirit, you are love.

I love memoirs. They are probably my favorite literary form, along with biographies. The more confessional, the better. There is so, so, so little truth in the popular culture, and I am starved and grateful for any I can find.

I find most famous Christians to be full of themselves and of prejudice and self-loathing, masquerading as devout religious belief. I find all fundamentalism to be terrifying and very destructive.

Whenever the world throws rose petals at you, which thrill and seduce the ego, beware.

If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. Otherwise, you'll just be rearranging furniture in rooms you've already been in.

These are pictures of the people in my family where we look like the most awkward and desperate folk you ever saw, poster children for the human condition.

Publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is.

I can never tell what I'm doing when I'm in the middle of publication because I have no confidence. I have terrible self-esteem, along with boundless narcissism.

I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all it is cracked up to be. But writing is.

I have actually come to believe that a person being herself is beautiful -- that contentment and acceptance and freedom are beautiful.

Peace is joy at rest. Joy is peace on its feet. quoting her pastor in Salon, April 25, 2003.

We all often feel like we are pulling teeth, even those writers whose prose ends up being the most natural and fluid. The right words and sentences just do not come pouring out like ticker tape most of the time.

Grace is having a commitment to- or at least an acceptance of- being ineffective and foolish. That our bottled charm is the main roadblock to drinking that clear cool glass of love.

Sometimes I think that Jesus watches my neurotic struggles, and shakes his head and grips his forehead and starts tossing back mojitos.

I am a terrible and lazy Christian. I do not believe that the Bible is the literal word of God. I just skip about a third of it.

The truth is that progress is usually small and sneaky.

Living on earth has always been a dangerous way to spend your time.

You have to keep taking the next necessary stitch, and the next one, and the next. Without stitches, you just have rags. And we are not rags.