Quotes from Anne Lamott

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

When we are stuck in our convictions and personas, we enter into the disease of having good ideas and being right.

I can teach them little things that may not be in any of the great books on writing. For instance, I'm not sure if anyone else has mentioned that December is traditionally a bad month for writing. It is a month of Mondays. Mondays are not good writing days. One has had all that freedom over the weekend, all that authenticity, all those dreamy dreams, and then your angry mute Slavic Uncle Monday arrives, and it is time to sit down at your desk.

Jesus was a rabbi, schooled by rabbis, who thought like rabbis. Rabbis, upon being asked a question by a disciple, usually answer with a paradoxical inquiry or a story. This can be annoying and time-consuming for those of us looking for neat, simple answers. But truth is too wild and complex to be contained in one answer, so Jesus often responded with a question or a parable.

My mind kept thinking its harsh thinky thoughts, but I would distract myself from them gently and say, 'Those are not the truth, those are not trustworthy, those are for entertainment purposes only.' Eventually I had quieter thoughts.

When the ancient Egyptians finished building the pyramids, they had built the pyramids.

God has smiled on me, He has set me free." For us to acknowledge that we have been set free from toxic dependency, from crippling obsession or guilt, that we have been graced with the ability finally to forgive someone, is just plain astonishing.

We're bugs struggling in the river, brightly visible to the trout below.

You have to be grateful whenever you get to someplace safe and okay, even if it turns out it wasn't quite where you were heading. The light you see when people are in the tunnel of deep trouble is domestic flashes of recognition and kitchen comforts, not Blake's radiance, which would be my preference.

How are we going to get through this craziness?" I asked. There was silence for a moment. "Left foot, right foot, left foot, breathe," he said.

it may just be that you are developing a quiet doggedness. This is priceless. Perfectionism, on the other hand, will only drive you mad.

the insidious palace lie that we will get over crushing losses means that our emotional GPS can never find true north, as it is based on maps that no longer mention the most important places we have been to.

you begin to notice all the props surrounding these people, and you begin to understand how props define us and comfort us, and show us what we value and what we need, and who we think we are.

I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises.

All that is holding us together [is] stories and compassion.

You are going to have to give and give and give, or there's no reason for you to be writing. You have to give from the deepest part of yourself, and you are going to have to go on giving, and the giving is going to have to be its own reward. There is no cosmic importance to your getting something published, but there is in learning to be a giver.

Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist's true friend.

I watched him carefully. He was making art because he has to, and because he's brave enough to try and make contact, right there on the edge of madness, where he dreams.

I love ritual and repetition. Without them, I would be a balloon with a slow leak.

When you don't have enough or you run out, you feel in your core that the leak has begun and there will be no end to the leakage. And this makes you feel like a chump. Whereas having some money gives you the conviction that you're not naked in the howling wind, even though you basically are, existentially.

Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor, because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong.

In many spiritual and wisdom paths, it is written that God created us to have company and to be God's loving eyes and hands on earth. But in certain African Christian catechisms it says that God created us because He thought we would like it.

Hallelujah that in spite of it all, there is love, there is singing, nature, laughing, mercy.

We have to make ourselves available to one another, or we can't experience goodness. It's not so much us seeking God, tracking Her down with a butterfly net; it's agreeing to be found. The Old Girl reaches out to everyone and wants to include us in this beautiful, weird, sometimes anguished life. All people: go figure.