Quotes from Anne Lamott

Those plates would be filled with love, pride, and connection. That care is what we have longed for our whole lives, and what we create when we are kinder to our bodies and our hungry souls.

I hoped her life would turn topsy-turvy enough to get her attention. Topsy-turvy is often a symptom for the presence of God—the last become first, the hungry are fed, the obnoxious are welcomed.

Robert Burns said it best: "Life is but a day at most.

She walked to the front door. 'Hello?' 'Hello,' a woman's voice said. 'Are you a Witness?' 'I swear to God I didn't see a thing.

You must learn about people from people, not from what you read. Your reading should confirm what you've observed in the world.

To be a good writer, you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care.

I'm not sure I even recognize the ever-presence of mercy anymore, the divine and the human; the messy, crippled, transforming, heartbreaking, lovely, devastating presence of mercy. But I have come to believe that I am starving to death for it, and my world is, too.

So try to calm down, get quiet, breathe, and listen.

Once you know where true is, it defines everything else that has to happen.

As well as we know our grown children and relatives, we don't know how much energy they have to put into simply keeping their lives together at all.

Is it okay to be a tiny tiny bit tired of Caitlyn? Yes, was very brave but so far he's gone from man to mannequin, instead of man to woman.

Sigh: who was it who said that to get into heaven, you needed a letter of recommendation from the poor?

The trees are so huge that they shut you up.

If you stop trying to control your mind so much, you'll have intuitive hunches about what this or that character is all about.

To be engrossed by something outside the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass--seeing things in such a narrow and darkly narcissistic way that it presents a colo-rectal theology, offering hope to no one.

Will call him a she when the pee-pee is gone. Says Brave is to endure stares, jeers, prejudice. He won't.

How can we know all this, yet somehow experience joy? Because that's how we are designed – for awareness and curiosity. We are hardwired with curiosity inside us, because life knew that this would keep us going even in bad sailing.

I don't think you have time to waste not writing because you are afraid you won't be good enough at it, and I don't think you have time to waste on someone who does not respond to you with kindness and respect. You don't want to spend your time around people who make you hold your breath. You can't fill up when you're holding your breath.

Some of my wise, more evolved friends say that loathing certain people, henceforth referred to as Them, is not worth the effort, that they are too thin as human forms to actually hate. I say, 'Not for me, baby.

If you're lost in the forest, let the horse find the way home.

Every sound is by definition a stop, which is how we can hear it.

if you've worked in good faith for a couple of hours but cannot hear it today, have some lunch.

Getting found almost always means being lost for a while

People like to say that we cannot forgive others until we forgive ourselves. Isn't that nice? People like to say all sorts of stupid bumper-sticker things that aren't true and that in fact can be shaming...