Quotes from Anne Lamott

Dogs are the closest we come to knowing the divine love of God on this side of eternity.

Nothing heals us like letting people know our scariest parts: When people listen to you cry and lament, and look at you with love, it's like they are holding the baby of you.

The worst part about celebrating another birthday is the shock that you're only as well as you are.

For me, Jesus is my cleft in the rock. He is my safest friend, my safe totally loving accepting big brother.

I'm human, you're human, let me greet your humanness. Let's be people together for a while.

Everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, and scared, even the people who seem to have it more or less together.

Love is so much bigger than our ignorance.

To love yourself as you are is a miracle, and to seek yourself is to have found yourself for now. And now is all we have, and love is who we are.

Being a parent is absolutely exhausting and draining, along with all the joy and love.

Nothing can be delicious when you are holding your breath.

... everyone has come to understand that unconditional love is a reality, but with as shelf life of about eight to ten seconds. [p. 110]

All parents are an embarrassment to their kids. Often, grandparents are the relief. Kids don't have to resist you.

My coming to faith did not start with a leap but rather a series of staggers from what seemed like one safe place to another. Like lily pads, round and green, these places summoned and then held me up while I grew. Each prepared me for the next leaf on which I would land, and in this way I moved across the swamp of doubt and fear.

My parents, and librarians along the way, taught me about the space between words; about the margins, where so many juicy moments of life and spirit and friendship could be found. In a library, you could find miracles and truth and you might find something that would make you laugh so hard that you get shushed, in the friendliest way.

I try to write the books I would love to come upon that are honest, concerned with real lives, human hearts, spiritual transformation, families, secrets, wonder, craziness - and that can make me laugh.

I went to Goucher College in Maryland for the best possible reasons - to learn - but then I dropped out at 19 for the best possible reasons - to become a writer.

I quit my last real job, as a writer at a magazine, when I was twenty-one. That was the moment when I lost my place of prestige on the fast track, and slowly, millimeter by millimeter, I started to get found, to discover who I had been born to be, instead of the impossibly small package, all tied up tightly in myself, that I had agreed to be.

I feel incredibly successful. I make a living as a writer and am able to help support a big family, my church, my bleeding-heart causes.

I am not writing to try and convert people to fundamental Christianity. I am just trying to share my experience, strength and hope, that someone who is as messed up and neurotic and scarred and scared can be fully accepted by our dear Lord, no questions asked.

Being on a book tour is like being on the seesaw when you're a little kid. The excitement is in having someone to play with, and in rising up in the air, but then you're at the mercy of those holding you down, and if it's your older brother, or Paul Wolfowitz, they leap up, so that you crash down and get hurt.

I didn't need to understand the hypostatic unity of the Trinity; I just needed to turn my life over to whoever came up with redwood trees.

I just try to love and serve everyone, and bring everyone water, and lend an ear; that's what Jesus said to do.

I think Jesus is divine love manifest on Earth, as it comes through the community of Christians.

I don't think anything is the opposite of love.