Quotes from Anne Lamott

I got a lot of things that society had promised would make me whole and fulfilled - all the things that the culture tells you from preschool on will quiet the throbbing anxiety inside you - stature, the respect of colleagues, maybe even a kind of low-grade fame.

I am the woman I grew to be partly in spite of my mother, and partly because of the extraordinary love of her best friends, and my own best friends' mothers, and from surrogates, many of whom were not women at all but gay men. I have loved them my entire life, even after their passing.

It was simple reality - most competitive tennis players in my day were privileged, spoiled, entitled and white. Also, many of them were beautiful, fit, tan and of good stock - great big hair and white teeth and long legs. Then there were the rest of us.

It was not facing what life dealt that made you crazy, but rather trying to set life straight where it was unstraightenable.

I like to read away as much of the afternoon as possible, until real life rears its ugly head.

When we search for something larger than our own selves to hook into, we can come through whatever life throws at us.

So Rita and I decided that the most subversive, revolutionary thing I could do was to show up for my life and not be ashamed.

Mostly what happens in the novels never happened in real life.

This is the Easter message, that awakening is possible, to the goodness of God, the sacredness of human life, the sisterhood and brotherhood of all.

Clutter and mess show us that life is being lived.

The grief and tears didn't wash me away. They gave me my life back! They cleansed me, baptized me, hydrated the earth at my feet.

Sometimes I think God loves the ones who most desperately ache and are most desperately lost - his or her wildest, most messed-up children - the way you'd ache and love a screwed-up rebel daughter in juvenile hall.

I loved every second of Catholic church. I loved the sickly sweet rotting-pomegranate smells of the incense. I loved the overwrought altar, the birdbath of holy water, the votive candles; I loved that there was a poor box, the stations of the cross rendered in stained glass on the windows.

Everyone is flailing through this life without an owner's manual, with whatever modicum of grace and good humor we can manage.

Life is really pretty tricky, and there's a lot of loss, and the longer you stay alive, the more people you lose whom you actually couldn't live without.

There are a lot of us, some published, some not, who think the literary life is the loveliest one possible, this life of reading and writing and corresponding. We think this life is nearly ideal.

Living on Earth has always been a dangerous way to spend your time.

Mothering has been the richest experience of my life, but I am still opposed to Mother's Day. It perpetuates the dangerous idea that all parents are somehow superior to non-parents.

Presents can make up for some of the disappointments that life doles out, such as it makes almost no sense and is coming to an end more quickly than ever.

Can you imagine the hopelessness of trying to live a spiritual life when you're secretly looking up at the skies not for illumination or direction, but to gauge, miserably, the odds of rain?

Life with most teenagers was like having a low-grade bladder infection. It hurts, but you had to tough it out.

You must not inflict life on someone who will be resented.

Some people seem to understand this - that life and change take time - but I am not one of those people.

I'd like to learn to meditate with more enthusiasm. I can sit down and get quiet for 20 minutes, but it just has not been a part of my Christianity at all.