Quotes from Anne Lamott

The search for meaning will fill you with a sense of meaning. Otherwise

It's not like you don't have a choice, because you do—you can either type or kill yourself.

However, in the meantime, we are going to concentrate on writing itself, on how to become a better writer, because, for one thing, becoming a better writer is going to help you become a better reader, and that is the real payoff.

Some aching beauty comes with huge loss, although maybe not right away, when it would be helpful. Life is a very powerful force, despite the constant discouragement. So if you are a person with connections to life, a few tendrils eventually break through the sidewalk of loss, and you notice them, maybe space out studying them for a few moments, or maybe they tickle you into movement and response, if only because you have to scratch your nose.

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 never get over certain losses, but the anguish part eventually ends, and it all just sucks for a while. There were moments when I understood that there was nothing much I was going to understand or figure out. There was simply the present moment, awareness, impermanence, birdsong, love. There is no fixing this setup here. It seems broken and ruined at times, but it isn't: it's simply the nature of human life.

Easter is so profound. Christmas was an afterthought in the early Church, the birth not observed for a couple hundred years. But no one could help noticing the resurrection: Rumi said that spring was Christ, "martyred plants rising up from their shrouds." Easter says that love is more powerful than death, bigger than the dark, bigger than cancer, bigger even than airport security lines.

She wants to have hiked; I want to have had dessert.

that writing motivates you to look closely at life, at life as it lurches by and tramps around. Writing

Thurber was right when he said, "You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backwards.

My father treated them with respect and kindness, his main philosophical and spiritual position being: Don't be an asshole.

Forget letting go and letting God. It was time for brooding, stewing, victimized self-righteousness, and thoughts of revenge. Now you're talking.

But as Rumi said, "Through love all pain will turn to medicine," not most pain, or for other people; and the pain and failures grew me, helped slowly restore me to the person I was born to be. I had to learn that life was not going to be filling if I tried to scrunch myself into somebody else's idea of me, i.e., someone sophisticated enough to prefer dark chocolate. I like milk chocolate, like M&M's: so sue me. But I no longer have to stuff myself to the gills.

They taught me to pay attention, but not so much attention to my tiny princess mind.

We live stitch by stitch, when we're lucky.

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. It can be received gladly or grudgingly, in big gulps or in tiny tastes.

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.

Mercy is radical kindness. Mercy means offering or being offered aid in desperate straits. Mercy is not deserved. It involves absolving the unabsolvable, forgiving the unforgiveable.

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.

do you still believe that I am the Resurrection and the Life? Even when you don't get what you want? Even when nothing makes sense?

clutter and mess show us that life is being lived.

Kindness toward others and radical kindness to ourselves buy us a shot at a warm and generous heart, which is the greatest prize of all.

Mercy means compassion, empathy, a heart for someone's troubles. It's not something you do – it is something in you, accessed, revealed, or cultivated through use, like a muscle. We find it in the most unlikely places, never where we first look.

You must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you're a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this.