Quotes from Anne Lamott

that getting all of one's addictions under control is a little like putting an octopus to bed.

There is no cosmic importance to your getting published, but there is in learning to be a giver.

We all know we're going to die; what's important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this.

Try to remember that to some extent, you're just the typist. A good typist listens.

We're individuals in time and space who are often gravely lost, and then miraculously, in art, found.

I would give her the same advice God always gives me if I think to ask: Go do some anonymous things for lonely people, give a few bucks to every poor person you see, return phone calls. Get out of yourself and become a person for others, while simultaneously practicing radical self-care: maybe have a bite to eat, check in with the sky twice, buy some cute socks, take a nap.

Make me a channel of Thy peace, that where there is hatred, let me sow love, or at least not fertilize the hate with my dainty bullshit.

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.

If you... don't get to hear or read stories about your world, you can be fooled into thinking that the world isn't miraculous—and it is.

Sin is not just affairs, or porn shops, or drug cartels. It is also the ignorance and brokenness of the world, extreme self-centeredness, hoarding wealth, using others as objects, not caring.

I remind myself of this when I cannot get any work done: to live as if I am dying, because the truth is we are all terminal on this bus. To live as if we are dying gives us a chance to experience some real presence.

How did we all get so screwed up? Putting aside our damaged parents, poverty, abuse, addiction, disease, and other unpleasantries, life just damages people. There is no way around this.

You could see the amazing fortitude of people going through horror with grace, looking right into the pit and seeing that this is what you've got, this disease, or maybe even jealousy. So you do as well as you can with it. And this ravaged body or wounded psyche can and should be still be cared for as softly and tenderly as possible.

A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost

what good people can do in the face of great sorrow. We help some time pass for those suffering. We sit with them in their hopeless pain and feel terrible with them, without trying to fix them with platitudes; doing this with them is just about the most gracious gift we have to offer. We give up what we think we should be doing, or think we need to get done, to keep them company. We help them to bear being in time and space during unbearable times and spaces.

grace is a small white butterfly, and life is a semi trailer careening up 101.

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 a lot 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.

It may strike you as a small miracle that you have someone in your life, whose taste you admire, who will tell you the truth and help you stay on the straight and narrow, or find your way back to it if you are lost.

Most of us have done fairly well in our lives. We learned how to run on that one wheel, but now we want a refund.

I devoured books like a person taking vitamins, afraid that otherwise I would remain this gelatinous narcissist, with no possibility of ever becoming thoughtful, of ever being taken seriously.

All I ever wanted was to belong, to wear that hat of belonging.

We're mimics, we're parrots - we're writers.

For somebody to be on a search means he or she is involved with these subversive topics, reading and comparing notes with allies, asking questions, daydreaming, brooding. Even though you have homework to do.

On writer's block: The word block suggests that you are constipated or stuck, when the truth is that you're empty.