Quotes from Anne Lamott

Forgiveness means it finally becomes unimportant that you hit back.

Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue

She said to go ahead and feel the feelings. I did. They felt like shit.

As a Christian and a feminist, the most important message I can carry and fight for is the sacredness of each human life, and reproductive rights for all women are a crucial part of that. It is a moral necessity that we not be forced to bring children into the world for whom we cannot be responsible and adoring and present. We must not inflict life on children who will be resented; we must not inflict unwanted children on society.

because when people have seen you at their worst, you don't have to put on the mask as much.

Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you're conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader. He or she will recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of.

If you want to make God laugh, tell her your plans.

The problem is acceptance, which is something we're taught not to do. We're taught to improve uncomfortable situations, to change things, alleviate unpleasant feelings. But if you accept the reality that you have been given- that you are not in a productive creative period- you free yourself to begin filling up again.

My heart was broken and my head was just barely inhabitable

We begin to find and become ourselves when we notice how we are already found, already truly, entirely, wildly, messily, marvelously who we were born to be.

Don't look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.

There's a lovely Hasidic story of a rabbi who always told his people that if they studied the Torah, it would put Scripture on their hearts. One of them asked, Why on our hearts, and not in them? The rabbi answered, Only God can put Scripture inside. But reading sacred text can put it on your heart, and then when your hearts break, the holy words will fall inside.

If you have a body, you are entitled to the full range of feelings. It comes with the package.

I worry that Jesus drinks himself to sleep when he hears me talk like this.

the three things I cannot change are the past, the truth, and you.

My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I'm grateful for it the way I'm grateful for the ocean.

It is unearned love--the love that goes before, that greets us on the way. It's the help you receive when you have no bright ideas left, when you are empty and desperate and have discovered that your best thinking and most charming charm have failed you. Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there.

most of the time, all you have is the moment, and the imperfect love of the people around you.

I've given guys blow jobs just because I've run out of things to talk about.' Oh, Rae. Who hasn't

since you can't heal your own sick mind with your own sick mind, I needed to consult somebody else's sick mind.

Perfection is shallow, unreal, and fatally uninteresting.

You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the rational mind. The rational mind doesn't nourish you. You assume that it gives you the truth, because the rational mind is the golden calf that this culture worships, but this is not true. Rationality squeezes out much that is rich and juicy and fascinating.

Never compare your insides to everyone else's outsides.

Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.