Quotes from Anne Lamott

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.

A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way.

When we think we can do it all ourselves--fix, save, buy, or date a nice solution--it's hopeless. We're going to screw things up. We're going to get our tentacles wrapped around things and squirt our squiddy ink all over, so that there is even less visibility, and then we're going to squeeze the very life out of everything.

It's incredibly touching when someone who seems so hopeless finds a few inches of light to stand in and makes everything work as well as possible. All of us lurch and fall, sit in the dirt, are helped to our feet, keep moving, feel like idiots, lose our balance, gain it, help others get back on their feet, and keep going.

I was learning the secrets of life: that you could become the woman you'd dared to dream of being, but to do so you were going to have to fall in love with your own crazy, ruined self.

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.

I'll live as well, as deeply, as madly as I can--until I die.

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've got to learn to let go and let your children fall, and fail. If you try to protect them from hurt, and always rush to their side with Band-Aids, they won't learn about life, and what is true, what works, what helps, and what are real consequences of certain kinds of behavior. When they do get hurt, which they will, they won't know how to take care of their grown selves. They won't even know where the aspirin is kept.

Being a writer guarantees that you will spend too much time alone -- and that as a result, your mind will begin to warp.

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.

I love Wendell Berry's lines that "it may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.

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

When you love something like reading—or drawing or music or nature—it surrounds you with a sense of connection to something great.

We're all afraid of the same stuff. Mostly we're afraid that we're secretly not okay, that we're disgusting, or frauds, or about to be diagnosed with cancer. ... We want to teach you how to quiet the yammer ... how you can create comfort, inside and outside, how you can get warm, how you can feed yourself. And even learn to get through silence. ... There is a wilderness inside you, and a banquet. Both. [p. 253]

Having a great narrator is like having a great friend whose company you love, whose mind you love to pick, whose running commentary totally holds your attention, who makes you laugh out loud, whose lines you always want to steal. When you have a friend like this, she can say, Hey, I've got to drive up to the dump in Petaluma--wanna come along? and you honestly can't think of anything in the world you'd rather do.

I never had a particularly strong craving to procreate, except for earlier fantasies of wanting to be Marmee in Little Women.

Can you imagine the hopelessness of trying to live a spiritual life when you're secretly looking up at the skies not for illumination or direction, but to gauge, miserably, the odds of rain?

When what we see catches us off guard, and when we write it as realistically and openly as possible, it offers hope. You look around and say, Wow, there's that same mockingbird; there's that woman in the red hat again. The woman in the red hat is about hope because she's in it up to her neck, too, yet every day she puts on that crazy red hat and walks to town.

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

But you don't always get what you want;,you get what you get

Oh, but my stomach, she is like a waterbed covered in flannel. When I lie on my side in bed, my stomach lies politely beside me, like a puppy.

Listen to your broccoli and it will tell you how to eat it.

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. But we do. We have so much we want to say and figure out.