Quotes from Anne Lamott

You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the rational mind.

I heard a preacher say recently that hope is a revolutionary patience; let me add that so is being a writer.

good dialogue encompasses both what is said and what is not said.

John Gardner wrote that the writer is creating a dream into which he or she invites the reader, and that the dream must be vivid and continuous.

got dropped off at the airport in a better mood than I had arrived in. In the third third of life, you may become just as miserable and prickly as ever, but you cycle through more quickly. You remember other dark nights of the soul and how by dawn they always broke. You discover that everything helps you learn who you are, and that this is why we are here. You roll your eyes at yourself more gently. You sigh and go make yourself a cup of tea.

Don't be mean to yourself, though . . .this is the only sin.

Start with your childhood, I tell them. Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can.

When we try to see a damaged person as one of God's regular old customers, instead of a lost cause, it takes the pressure off everybody. We can then loosen our death grip on the person, which usually results in progress for everyone, also known in certain circles as grace.

There really is only today, although luckily that is also the eternal now.

Is the soul damaged by acne, political madness, rigid or unloving parents? I think so, damaged but not mortally so. It becomes callused, barricaded, yet it's always there for the asking, always ready for hope. Some poet once wrote that we think we are drops in the ocean, but that we are really the ocean in drops, both minute and everything there is.

Also, I have a pouch below my belly, whereas I'd always had a thin waist before. Now there's this situation down there, low and grabbable. If it had a zipper, you could store stuff in there, like a fanny pack.

If we stay where we are, where we're stuck, where we're comfortable and safe, we die there. We become like mushrooms, living in the dark, with poop up to our chins. If you want to know only what you already know, you're dying.

Gratitude begins in our hearts and then dovetails into behavior. It almost always makes you willing to be of service, which is where the joy resides. It means you are willing to stop being such a jerk. When you are aware of all that has been given to you, in your lifetime and in the past few days, it is hard not to be humbled, and pleased to give back. Most

When I feel like shoveling in food, the emptiness can be filled only with love (April 2012, O Magazine)

hate to be wrong, and I hate that I am wrong so often in so many ways, that my thinking is often defensive, judgmental, and skittish. (I have a thinking disorder. I once took a 20 Questions quiz about drinking but substituted thinking and I got most of them: Do you prefer to think alone? Do you hide your thinking from loved ones? Has thinking begun to impact your health and quality of life?) Anyway

They kind of want to write, but they really want to be published. You'll never get to where you want to be that way, I tell them.

day by day you have to give the work before you all the best stuff you have, not saving up for later projects. If you give freely, there will always be more.

Haters want us to hate them, because hate is incapacitating. When we hate, we can't operate from our real selves, which is our strength. Now that I think of it, this is such a great reason to give up our hate—as revenge, to deprive the haters of what they want.

whatever you use to keep the pain at bay robs you of the flecks and nuggets of gold that feeling grief will give you.

But in surrender you have won.

She quoted the Reverend James Forbes as saying, "Nobody gets into heaven without a letter of reference from the poor.

I am positive of only a few things in life, and one is that if you want to have a decent middle and old age, you have to get exercise almost every day.

You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.

Grace means suddenly you're in a different universe from the one where you were stuck, and there was absolutely no way for you to get there on your own.