Anne Lamott

“Prayer means that, in some unique way, we believe we’re invited into a relationship with someone who hears us when we speak in silence.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Laughter is the key that grace has arrived.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Some people have a thick skin and you don’t. Your heart is really open and that is going to cause pain, but that is an appropriate response to this world. The cost is high, but the blessing of being compassionate is beyond your wildest dreams.” ~ Anne Lamott

“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.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be?” ~ Anne Lamott

“Radical self-care is what we’ve been longing for, desperate for, our entire lives-friendship with our own hearts.” ~ Anne Lamott

“It’s funny: I always imagined when I was a kid that adults had some kind of inner toolbox full of shiny tools: the saw of discernment, the hammer of wisdom, the sandpaper of patience. But then when I grew up I found that life handed you these rusty bent old tools – friendships, prayer, conscience, honesty – and said ‘do the best you can with these, they will have to do’. And mostly, against all odds, they do.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. It’s like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Lies cannot nourish or protect you. Only freedom from fear, freedom from lies, can make us beautiful, and keep us safe.” ~ Anne Lamott

“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.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Dogs are the closest we come to knowing the divine love of God on this side of eternity.” ~ Anne Lamott

“I’m here to be me, which is taking a great deal longer than I had hoped.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Love falls to earth, rises from the ground, pools around the afflicted. Love pulls people back to their feet. Bodies and souls are fed. Bones and lives heal. New blades of grass grow from charred soil. The sun rises.” ~ Anne Lamott

“I thought such awful thoughts that I cannot even say them out loud because they would make Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish.” ~ Anne Lamott

“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.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Gratitude, not understanding, is the secret to joy and equanimity.” ~ Anne Lamott

“I do not know much about God and prayer, but I have come to believe over the last twenty-five years, that there’s something to be said about keeping prayer simple. Help, Thanks, Wow.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Joy is the best makeup.” ~ Anne Lamott

“It’s intrusive for grandparents to think they’re in charge. It’s manipulative. Also, it’s self-destructive, since if the parents have to resist you, you won’t get your mitts on the kid as often.” ~ Anne Lamott

“So a moral position is not a message. A moral position is a passionate caring inside you.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Very few writers really know what they are doing until they have done it.” ~ Anne Lamott

“This is a very violent place to live, the Earth, and we’re a very violent species. Cain is still killing Abel. We see that every day.” ~ Anne Lamott

“You can change the world with a hot bath, if you sink into it from a place of knowing that you are worth profound care, even when you’re dirty and rattled.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Forgiveness is having given up all hope of having had a better past.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act – truth is always subversive.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.” ~ Anne Lamott

“No one can appropriate God, goodness, the Bible or Jesus. It just seems that way.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Your unconscious can’t work when you are breathing down its neck.” ~ Anne Lamott

“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.” ~ Anne Lamott

“This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won’t wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Being enough was going to have to be an inside job.” ~ Anne Lamott

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

“I just can’t get over how much babies cry. I really had no idea what I was getting into. To tell you the truth, I thought it would be more like getting a cat.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Life is really pretty tricky, and there’s a lot of loss, and the longer you stay alive, the more people you lose whom you actually couldn’t live without.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Forgiving people doesn’t necessarily mean you want to meet them for lunch. It means you try to undo the Velcro hook. Lewis Smedes said it best: “To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Also, I have a pouch below my belly, whereas I’d always had a thin waist before. Now there’s this situation down there, low and grabbable. If it had a zipper, you could store stuff in there, like a fanny pack.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Churches are good for prayer, but so are garages and cars and mountains and showers and dance floors.” ~ Anne Lamott

“When you love something like reading – or drawing or music or nature – it surrounds you with a sense of connection to something great.” ~ Anne Lamott

“This is the Easter message, that awakening is possible, to the goodness of God, the sacredness of human life, the sisterhood and brotherhood of all.” ~ Anne Lamott

“The physical body is acknowledged as dust, the personal drama as delusion. It is as if the world we perceive through our senses, that whole gorgeous and terrible pageant, were the breath-thin surface of a bubble, and everything else, inside and outside, is pure radiance. Both suffering and joy come then like a brief reflection, and death like a pin.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don’t give up.” ~ Anne Lamott

“My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I’m grateful for it the way I’m grateful for the ocean.” ~ Anne Lamott

“I am learning slowly to bring my crazy pinball-machine mind back to this place…” ~ Anne Lamott

“You don’t always have to chop with the sword of truth. You can point with it too.” ~ Anne Lamott

“When you make friends with fear, it can’t rule you.” ~ Anne Lamott

“I’m human, you’re human, let me greet your humanness. Let’s be people together for a while.” ~ Anne Lamott

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

“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

“Forgiveness means it finally becomes unimportant that you hit back.” ~ Anne Lamott

“If God was giving me a ham, I’d be crazy not to receive it. Maybe it was the ham of God, who takes away the sins of the world.” ~ Anne Lamott

“When God is going to do something wonderful, He or She always starts with a hardship; when God is going to do something amazing, He or She starts with an impossibility.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Radical self-care is quantum, and radiates out into the atmosphere, like a little fresh air.” ~ Anne Lamott

“You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.” ~ Anne Lamott

“And as it turns out, if one person is praying for you, buckle up. Things can happen.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Your problem is how you are going to spend this one and precious life you have been issued. Whether you’re going to spend it trying to look good and creating the illusion that you have power over circumstances, or whether you are going to taste it, enjoy it and find out the truth about who you are.” ~ Anne Lamott

“By the end I was deteriorating faster than I could lower my standards.” ~ Anne Lamott

“We learn from pain that some of the things we thought were castles turn out to be prisons, and we desperately want out, but even though we built them, we can’t find the door. Yet maybe if you ask God for help in knowing which direction to face, you’ll have a moment of intuition. Maybe you’ll see at least one next right step you can take.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Feeding a baby is like filling a hole with putty – you get it in and then you sort of shave off all the excess around the hole and get it back in, like you’re spackling.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Good therapy helps. Good friends help. Pretending that we are doing better than we are doesn’t. Shame doesn’t. Being heard does.” ~ Anne Lamott

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

“Then the singing enveloped me. It was furry and resonant, coming from everyone’s very heart. There was no sense of performance or judgment, only that the music was breath and food.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Rituals are a good signal to your unconscious that it is time to kick in.” ~ Anne Lamott

“When faced with a crisis, do three things: breathe, pray and be kind.” ~ Anne Lamott

“I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that alot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.” ~ Anne Lamott

“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.” ~ Anne Lamott

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

“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” ~ Anne Lamott

“The evidence is in, and you are the verdict.” ~ Anne Lamott

“The reason I never give up hope is because everything is so basically hopeless.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.” ~ Anne Lamott

“My father really taught me that you really develop the habit of writing and you sit down at the same time every day, you don’t wait for inspiration.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Haters want us to hate them, because hate is incapacitating. When we hate, we can’t operate from our real selves, which is our strength.” ~ Anne Lamott

“I suspect that he was a child who thought differently than his peers, who may have had serious conversations with grown-ups, who as a young person, like me, accepted being alone quite a lot. I think that this sort of person often becomes either a writer or a career criminal.” ~ Anne Lamott

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

“The first holy truth in God 101 is that men and women of true faith have always had to accept the mystery of God’s identity and love and ways. I hate that, but it’s the truth.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Everybody thinks their opinion is the right one. If they didn’t, they would get a new one.” ~ Anne Lamott

“I don’t remember who said this, but there really are places in the heart you don’t even know exist until you love a child.” ~ Anne Lamott

“You want to give me chocolate and flowers? That would be great. I love them both. I just don’t want them out of guilt, and I don’t want them if you’re not going to give them to all the people who helped mother our children.” ~ Anne Lamott

“It feels like I’m babysitting in the Twilight Zone. I keep waiting for the parents to show up because we are out of chips and diet cokes.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Getting into a new relationship is like pouring Miracle-Gro on your character defects.” ~ Anne Lamott

“All I ever wanted since I arrived here on earth are the same things I needed as a baby, to go from cold to warm, lonely to held, the vessel to the giver, empty to full.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns.” ~ Anne Lamott

“I am going to notice the lights of the earth, the sun and the moon and the stars, the lights of our candles as we march, the lights with which spring teases us, the light that is already present.” ~ Anne Lamott

“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?” ~ Anne Lamott

“All freedom comes from discipline.” ~ Anne Lamott

“If you don’t know where to start, remember that every single thing that happened to you is yours and you get to tell it.” ~ Anne Lamott

“I go to church every Sunday, which is like going to the gas station once a week and really, really filling up.” ~ Anne Lamott

“It’s good to do uncomfortable things. It’s weight training for life.” ~ Anne Lamott

“I think we’re all pretty crazy on this bus. I’m not sure I know anyone who’s got all the dots on his or her dice.” ~ Anne Lamott

“A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way. It’s a lie if you make something up. But you make it up in the name of truth, and then you give your heart to expressing it clearly.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Joy is the best makeup. But a little lipstick is a close runner-up.” ~ Anne Lamott

“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.” ~ Anne Lamott

“A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft – you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft – you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it’s loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.” ~ Anne Lamott

“The grief and tears didn’t wash me away. They gave me my life back! They cleansed me, baptized me, hydrated the earth at my feet.” ~ Anne Lamott

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

“You can get the monkey off your back, but the circus never leaves town.” ~ Anne Lamott

“If you’re lucky you find your way into a spiritual community and you start to find the great teachers of all the ages who said the same thing. There’s only love, you’re made of love.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Perfection is shallow, unreal, and fatally uninteresting.” ~ Anne Lamott

“It’s a great time to be alive.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Help is the sunny side of control.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Sometimes, no matter how screwed up things seem, I feel like we’re all at a wedding. But you can’t just come out and say, We’re at a wedding! Have some cake! You need to create a world into which we can enter, a world where we can see this.” ~ Anne Lamott

“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.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Where do we even start on the daily walk of restoration and awakening? We start where we are.” ~ Anne Lamott

“My idea of absolute happiness is to be in bed on a rainy day, with my blankie, my cat, and my dog.” ~ Anne Lamott

“We are not here to see through one another, but to see one another through.” ~ Anne Lamott

“How alive am I willing to be?” ~ Anne Lamott

“For me, Jesus is my cleft in the rock. He is my safest friend, my safe totally loving accepting big brother.” ~ Anne Lamott

“To paraphrase Paul Tillich, the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty.” ~ Anne Lamott

“To be great, art has to point somewhere.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Right foot, left foot, right foot, breathe.” ~ Anne Lamott

“I didn’t need to understand the hypostatic unity of the Trinity; I just needed to turn my life over to whoever came up with redwood trees.” ~ Anne Lamott

“There is nothing as sweet as a comeback, when you are down and out, about to lose, and out of time.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor.” ~ Anne Lamott

“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Good writing is about telling the truth.” ~ Anne Lamott

“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.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor; the enemy of the people. It will keep you insane your whole life.” ~ Anne Lamott

“I don’t have any romantic views of parenting. Every step of the way it’s really hard. It’s a dangerous world, physically and psychologically.” ~ Anne Lamott

“My best teachers were mess, failure, death, mistakes, and the people I hated, including myself.” ~ Anne Lamott

“We write to expose the unexposed. If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. The writer’s job is to turn the unspeakable into words – not just into any words, but if we can, into rhythm and blues.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Hope is not logical. It always comes as a surprise, just when you think all hope is lost. Hope is the cousin to grief, and both take time: you can’t short-circuit grief, or emptiness, and you can’t patch it up with your bicycle tire tube kit. You have to take the next right action.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Some people won’t go the extra mile, and then on their birthday, when no one makes a fuss, they feel neglected and bitter.” ~ Anne Lamott

“I write because writing is the gift God has given me to help people in the world.” ~ Anne Lamott

“The medieval German mystic Meister Eckhart said that if the soul could have known God without the world, God never would have created the world.” ~ Anne Lamott

“The harm is in the unwanted help or helping them when they need to figure things out for themselves. Help is the sunny side of control.” ~ Anne Lamott

“The difference between you and God is that God doesn’t think He’s you.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Or you might shout at the top of your lungs or whisper into your sleeve, “I hate you, God.” That is a prayer too, because it is real, it is truth, and maybe it is the first sincere thought you’ve had in months.” ~ Anne Lamott

“The reason ‘help’ is such a great prayer is that God is the gift of desperation. When you’re in despair, you’re teachable.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Sometimes grace is a ribbon of mountain air that gets in through the cracks.” ~ Anne Lamott

“The truth of my experience is that we are all a lot more alike than we are different.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Sometimes grace works like water wings when you feel you are sinking.” ~ Anne Lamott

“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.” ~ Anne Lamott

“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.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Sometimes Heaven is just a new pair of glasses.” ~ Anne Lamott

“When you pray, you are not starting the conversation from scratch, just remembering to plug back into a conversation that’s always in progress.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Nothing can be delicious when you are holding your breath.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don’t worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent.” ~ Anne Lamott

“You can either practice being right or practice being kind.” ~ Anne Lamott

“I woke up full of hate and fear the day before the most recent peace march in San Francisco. This was disappointing: I’d hoped to wake up feeling somewhere between Virginia Woolf and Wavy Gravy.” ~ Anne Lamott

“A good marriage is where both people feel like they’re getting the better end of the deal.” ~ Anne Lamott

“It’s better to be kind than to be right.” ~ Anne Lamott

“The miracle is that we are here, that no matter how undone we’ve been the night before, we wake up every morning and are still here. It is phenomenal just to be.” ~ Anne Lamott

“My understanding of incarnation is that we are not served by getting away from the grubbiness of suffering. Sometimes we feel that we are barely pulling ourselves forward through a tight tunnel on badly scraped-up elbows. But we do come out the other side, exhausted and changed.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Never compare your insides to everyone else’s outsides.” ~ Anne Lamott

“When people shine a little light on their monster, we find out how similar most of our monsters are.” ~ Anne Lamott

“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.” ~ Anne Lamott

“I don’t want something special. I want something beautifully plain.” ~ Anne Lamott

“My friend Terry says that when you need to make a decision, in your work or otherwise, and you don’t know what to do, just do one thing or the other, because the worst that can happen is that you will have made a terrible mistake.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Expectations are resentments under construction.” ~ Anne Lamott

“I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her.” ~ Anne Lamott

“A whole lot of us believers, of all different religions, are ready to turn back the tide of madness by walking together, in both the dark and the light – in other words, through life – registering voters as we go, and keeping the faith.” ~ Anne Lamott

“My deepest belief is that to live as if we’re dying can set us free. Dying people teach you to pay attention and to forgive and not to sweat the small things.” ~ Anne Lamott

“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.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Summer nearly does me in every year. It’s too hot and the light is unforgiving and the days go on way too long.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Once an old woman at my church said the secret is that God loves us exactly the way we are and that he loves us too much to let us stay like this, and I’m just trying to trust that.” ~ Anne Lamott

“I don’t think you have time to waste not writing because you are afraid you won’t be good at it.” ~ Anne Lamott

“In fact, not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Hope begins in the dark.” ~ Anne Lamott

“E-books are great for instant gratification – you see a review somewhere of a book that interests you, and you can start reading it five minutes later.” ~ Anne Lamott

“I don’t think you have time to waste not writing because you are afraid you won’t be good enough at it, and I don’t think you have time to waste on someone who does not respond to you with kindness and respect. You don’t want to spend your time around people who make you hold your breath. You can’t fill up when you’re holding your breath.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Rest and laughter are the most spiritual and subversive acts of all. Laugh, rest, slow down.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Don’t look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.” ~ 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

“Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.” ~ Anne Lamott

“The first draft is the child’s draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later.” ~ Anne Lamott

“There is a door we all want to walk through and writing can help you find it and open it.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Most of me was glad when my mother died. She was a handful, but not in a cute, festive way. More in a life-threatening way, that had caused me a long time ago to give up all hope of ever feeling good about having had her as a mother.” ~ Anne Lamott

“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.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Forgiveness means it finally becomes unimportant that you hit back. You’re done. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you want to have lunch with the person. If you keep hitting back, you stay trapped in the nightmare…” ~ Anne Lamott

“Everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, and scared.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Pay attention to the beauty surrounding you.” ~ Anne Lamott

“I can tell you that what you’re looking for is already inside you.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Gratitude begins in our hearts and then dovetails into behavior. It almost always makes you willing to be of service, which is where the joy resides.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Whenever the world throws rose petals at you, which thrill and seduce the ego, beware.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, and scared, even the people who seem to have it more or less together. They are much more like you than you would believe. So try not to compare your insides to their outsides.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Write regularly, whether you feel like writing or not, and whether you think what you’re writing is any good or not.” ~ Anne Lamott

“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.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Some people seem to understand this – that life and change take time – but I am not one of those people.” ~ Anne Lamott

“The road to enlightenment is long and difficult, and you should try not to forget snacks and magazines.” ~ Anne Lamott

“I get up. I walk. I fall down. Meanwhile, I keep dancing.” ~ Anne Lamott

“I wish grace and healing were more abracadabra kind of things. Also, that delicate silver bells would ring to announce grace’s arrival. But no, it’s clog and slog and scootch, on the floor, in the silence, in the dark.” ~ Anne Lamott

“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

“We, too, are shadow and light. We are not supposed to know this, or be all these different facets of humanity, bright and dark. We are raised to be bright and shiny, but there is meaning in the acceptance of our dusky and dappled side, and also in defiance.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Sometimes this human stuff is slimy and pathetic – jealousy especially so – but better to feel it and talk about it and walk through it than to spend a lifetime being silently poisoned.” ~ Anne Lamott

“If you have a problem you can solve by throwing money at it, you don’t have a very interesting problem.” ~ Anne Lamott

“When we search for something larger than our own selves to hook into, we can come through whatever life throws at us.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Laughter is a bubbly, effervescent form of holiness.” ~ Anne Lamott

“If it is someone else’s problem, you probably don’t have the solution.” ~ Anne Lamott

“I do not at all understand the mystery of grace – only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.” ~ Anne Lamott

“I thought the secret of life was obvious: be here now, love as if your whole life depended on it, find your life’s work, and try to get hold of a giant panda.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Grace means you’re in a different universe from where you had been stuck, when you had absolutely no way to get there on your own.” ~ Anne Lamott

“We were raised to believe in books, music, and nature.” ~ Anne Lamott

“A hundred years from now? All new people.” ~ Anne Lamott

“So I sit for a moment and then say a small prayer – please help me get out of the way so I can write what wants to be written.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Teenagers who do not go to church are adored by God, but they don’t get to meet some of the people who love God back.” ~ Anne Lamott

“I love silence. I seek and create it at every opportunity. I need it to work.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Butterflies and birds are like one perfect teaspoon of creation.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Laughter is carbonated holiness.” ~ Anne Lamott

“I believe that discipline and self-love are the total secrets to freedom.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Everyone is flailing through this life without an owner’s manual, with whatever modicum of grace and good humor we can manage.” ~ Anne Lamott

“I am going to try to pay attention to the spring. I am going to look around at all the flowers, and look up at the hectic trees. I am going to close my eyes and listen.” ~ Anne Lamott

“It is a violation of trust to use your kids as caulking for the cracks in you.” ~ Anne Lamott

“To love yourself as you are is a miracle, and to seek yourself is to have found yourself for now. And now is all we have, and love is who we are.” ~ Anne Lamott

“The opposite of faith is not doubt, it’s certainty.” ~ Anne Lamott