Quotes from Anne Lamott

My therapist said starving and dieting are like putting ice cream on a leg wound. I said that ice cream would feel cool and numbing. She said yes and then it would melt.

All good teachers know that inside a remote or angry person is a soul, way deep down, capable of a full human life--a person with hope of a better story, who has allies, and can read... To me, teaching is a holy calling, especially with students less likely to succeed. It's the gift not only of not giving up on people, but of even figuring out where to begin.

Books! To fling myself into a book, to be carried away to another world while being at my most grounded, on my butt or in my bed or favorite chair, is literally how I have survived being here at all.

weirdness of Halloween gave birth to November, stately and ponderous, the dramatic darkening in the days. She rested, and tried to dig a deep hole for herself, pull in her soul's cloak around her. The light of December was pinched, and it hung down, glowering and tight, and then rushed toward the winter solstice. The

It is the most difficult Zen practice to leave people to their destiny, even though it's painful—just loving them, and breathing with them, and distracting them in a sweet way, and laughing with them.

I've managed to get some work done nearly every day of my adult life, without impressive financial success.

We have all we need to come through. Against all odds, no matter what we've lost, no matter what messes we've made over time, no matter how dark the night, we offer and are offered kindness, soul, light, and food, which create breath and spaciousness, which create hope, sufficient unto the day.

My idea of everything going smoothly on an airplane is (a) that I not die in a slow-motion fiery crash or get stabbed to death by terrorists and (b) that none of the other passengers try to talk to me. All conversation should end at the moment the wheels leave the ground.

I've managed to get some work done nearly every day of my adult life, without impressive financial success. Yet I would do it all over again in a hot second, mistakes and doldrums and breakdowns and all. Sometimes I could not tell you exactly why, especially when it feels pointless and pitiful, like Sisyphus with cash-flow problems.

So I practice the fifth Get: I get in touch with others. I tell my partner the truth about how crunchy I feel inside, how unevolved or vindictive. Or I pick up the three-hundred-pound phone and tell a close friend. Or I get in the car and head to where one of my precious communities has gathered. This might be a park, my church, my Sunday school room; with hikers, sober people, townsfolk.

Faulkner describes in Light in August as "a prone and somnolent yellow cat

Scientists say we are made of stars, and I believe them, although my upper arms look like hell. Maybe someday the stars will reabsorb me. Maybe, as fundamentalist Christians have shared with me, I will rot in hell for all eternity, which I would hate, because I am very sensitive. Besides, I have known hell, and I have also known love. Love was bigger.

Writing is, for some of us, the latch that keeps the door of the pen closed, keeps those crazy ravenous dogs contained

Carl Jung said that most painful issues can't be solved—they can only be outgrown, but that takes time and deep work.

She did it because she was desperate, and so she listened to her heart. In my experience, there is a lot to be said for desperation—not exactly a bright side, but something expressed in words for which "God" could be considered an acronym: gifts of desperation.

thought such awful thoughts that I cannot even say them out loud because they would make Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish.

was the day I knew the ingredients of the spiritual that would serve me—love, poetry, prayer, meditation

Learning to read gave us a true oasis, salvation, in the same way that coming to know Jesus or the Buddha might eventually get some of us out of the fray, but it also isolated us. Reading helped us get blissfully lost in resonant worlds where we could rest or gape or laugh with recognition, but then we looked up again, at the dinner table, or the blacktop, or church, and we couldn't close the covers of those spooky books.

In fact, not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die.

You need to trust yourself, especially on a first draft, where amid the anxiety and self-doubt, there should be a real sense of your imagination and your memories walking and woolgathering, tramping the hills, romping all over the place. Trust them. Don't look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.

How come you can hear a chord, and then another chord, and then your heart breaks open?

sixth chapter of Luke: "Forgive, and ye shall be forgiven.

forgiveness meant that God is for giving

You can raise and care for your nearest and dearest the best you can, put them in the best schools, rehab, condo, or memory care, and never, ever give up on their having the best possible life available. But if you do so thinking you can rescue them with your good ideas and your checkbook, or get them to choose a healthy, realistic way of life, that mistake will make both of you much worse than you already are.