Quotes from Anne Lamott

And autumn ain't so shabby for wow, either. The colors are broccoli and flame and fox fur. The tang is apples, death, and wood smoke. The rot smells faintly of grapes, of fermentation, of one element being changed alchemically into another, and the air is moist and you sleep under two down comforters in a cold room. The trails are not dusty anymore, and you get to wear your favorite sweaters.

What a paradox: that we connect with God, with divinity, in our flesh and blood and time and space. We connect with God in our humanity. A great truth, attributed to Emily Dickinson, is that "hope inspires the good to reveal itself." This is almost all I ever need to remember. Gravity and sadness yank us down, and hope gives us a nudge to help one another get back up or to sit with the fallen on the ground, in the abyss, in solidarity.

You lose the known package of your nice organized self almost instantly here. Overeating is one way back, the way it is at funerals at home.

Telling the truth in an interesting way turns out to be about as easy and pleasurable as bathing a cat.

Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious.

One rarely knows where to begin the search for meaning, though by necessity, we can only start where we are.

They taught me that being of service, an ally to the lonely and suffering, a big-girl helper to underdogs, was my best shot at happiness. They taught me that most of my good ideas were not helpful, and that all of my ideas after ten p.m. were especially unhelpful. They taught me to pay attention, but not so much attention to my tiny princess mind.

Taking kids outside to love God and nature is just about the most Jesus-y thing we can do. Jesus was nearly always outside with his disciples, or alone with the stars. To take kids to a beach, even one that is littered, it to bring them to an altar (a big one) surrounded by the blue-grey ocean billowing outward like a skirt, flecked with sunlight, like foil or diamonds.

Usually if you pray from the heart, you get an answer—the phone rings or the mail comes, and light gets in through the cracks, so you can see the next right thing to do. That's all you need.

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.

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.

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.

but you have to remind yourself that perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor.

by the great Persian mystical poet Rumi: "Where there is ruin, there is hope for a treasure.

Rosie had been a little girl with a dead dad, and there was no getting around that or over that. Even a drunk dad, even an asshole, was better than a dead dad, which shouldn't reflect on you but did, and left a cannon hole in your heart. [p. 121]

Underneath all things means that beneath the floorboards, in the depths, in the spaces between the pebbles or sandy floor that contain the pond, that hold our own inside person, is something that can't be destroyed, a foundation that keeps all the water from sinking back into the earth. Something is there, something we need, when we come to rest, when all is lost.

Human lives are hard, even those of health and privilege, and don't make much sense. This is the message of the Book of Job: Any snappy explanation of suffering you come up with will be horseshit. God tells Job, who wants an explanation for all his troubles, "You wouldn't understand.

Think of a fine painter attempting to capture an inner vision, beginning with one corner of the canvas, painting what he thinks should be there, not quite pulling it off, covering it over with white paint, and trying again, each time finding out what his painting isn't, until finally he finds out what it is.

My lifelong and core belief, right after the conviction that I was defective, mildly annoying, and better than everyone else was that my help was helpful.

Almost every single thing you hope publication will do for you is a fantasy, a hologram--it's the eagle on your credit card that only seems to soar.

And I guess when you take away the resentment and disappointment, it's that simple. It is what we do in families: we help, because we were helped.

I mean "God" as shorthand for the Good, for the animating energy of love; for Life, for the light that radiates from within people and from above; in the energies of nature, even in our rough, messy selves.

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.

It is as if the right words, the true words, are already inside them, and they just want to help them get out.