Quotes from Anne Lamott

The secret is, if what we need and want is missing, we begin by going back to where we last saw it.

I have to. I've changed my mind so often." Neither of us spoke for a minute. "That's the worst reason to do something," I said.

Old age on a good day is a dance we don't know the steps to: we falter. We may not be going in the direction we'd anticipated, or have any clue at all about which way to turn next.

Sometimes ritual quiets the racket. Try it. Any number of things may work for you – an altar, for instance, or votive candles, sage smudges, small animal sacrifices, especially now that the Supreme Court has legalised them. (I cut out the headline the day this news came out and taped it above the kitty's water dish.)

I also learned that you didn't come onto this earth as a perfectionist or control freak. You weren't born a person of cringe and contraction. You were born as energy, as life, made of the same stuff as stars, blossoms, breezes. You learned contraction to survive, but that was then. You have paid through the nose--paid but good. It is now your turn to reap.

Honey,...you'll never draw another calm breath as long as you live. That blissful amniotic unconcerned state of people without children is a thing of the past.

I became a socialist for five weeks, then the bus ride to my socialist meetings wore me out.

You can change the world with a hot bath if you sink into from a place of knowing you are worthy of profound care, even if you are dirty and rattled.

Discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.

I never used to take my turn. I always gave my turn away. I helped others have a great turn. I must have had a clipboard by the time I was six, because by then I had a whole caseload of people to keep track of. After they had all gotten a turn, then maybe I could go, if there was time and it didn't bother anyone. Now I take my turn, as a radical act.

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 unforgivable. Mercy brings us to the miracle of apology, given and accepted, to unashamed humility when we have erred or forgotten. Charge it to our heads and not our hearts, as the elders in black churches have long said.

It stops and gasps at beauty and is bathed in it. And sometimes it begins to weep.

You reap exactly what you sow; that is, you cannot grow tulips from zucchini seeds.

You may feel a little as if writing a novel is like trying to level Mount McKinley with a dentist's drill.

I wish I had a secret I could let you in on, some formula my father passed on to me in a whisper just before he died, some code word that has enabled me to sit at my desk and land flights of creative inspiration like an air-traffic controller.

Nicky dropped the children off that night, he poked his head in long enough to say that everything had gone fine. The children ran into her arms. Harry smelled as sweet and pungent as sawdust, Ella as deliciously odd as puppy breath. The touch of their skin, the smells, made her whole again, like an animal lost in the wilds that finds its mother.

that a good marriage is one in which each spouse secretly thinks he or she got the better deal

How? You just start talking about it on paper, as you would to a very good friend.

It is okay to fear death. Many people who don't can be a little too pleased with themselves.

have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard.

We think that if our values aren't the correct ones, we would have other ones, which would then be the correct ones.

There is the absolute hopelessness we face that everyone we love will die, even our newborn granddaughter, even as we trust and know that love will give rise to growth, miracles, and resurrection.

So you—I—stuck to the family plan for a long time, because your success made everyone else so happy, even if you made yourself frantic and half dead trying to achieve it. You couldn't win at this game, and you couldn't stop trying. At least it was a home to return to, no matter how erratic, which is better than no home.

We religious types, even those who detest organized religion, pray for deeper faith and a greater sense of oneness with God.