Quotes from 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.

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

No one can appropriate God, goodness, the Bible or Jesus. It just seems that way.

I do believe that God is with us even when we're at our craziest and that this goodness guides, provides, and protects.

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.

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

if you want to know how God feels about money, look at whom she gives it to.

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.

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.

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 write because writing is the gift God has given me to help people in the world.

I do not have deep theological understanding or opinion, but I do not read the Bible as the literal word of God.

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.

Good writing is about telling the truth.

Good therapy helps. Good friends help. Pretending that we are doing better than we are doesn't. Shame doesn't. Being heard does.

Everything takes me forever. It's all lurch, flail. I hope that is good news to you writers.

No" is a complete sentence.

Honesty is not necessarily interesting. I don't want to hear about your dreams or your acid trips, probably unless you make them really interesting.

When hope is not pinned wriggling onto a shiny image or expectation, it sometimes floats forth and opens.

Laughter is carbonated holiness.

Hope begins in the dark.

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.

Joy is the best makeup.

A big heart is both a clunky and a delicate thing; it doesn't protect itself and it doesn't hide. It stands out, like a baby's fontanel, where you can see the soul pulse through.