Quotes from Anne Lamott

Love is gentle if sometimes amused warmth for annoying and deeply disappointing people, especially ourselves.

As far as I can recall, none of the adults in my life ever once remembered to say, "Some people have a thick skin and you don't. Your heart is really open and that is going to cause pain, but that is an appropriate response to this world. The cost is high, but the blessing of being compassionate is beyond your wildest dreams. However, you're not going to feel that a lot in seventh grade. Just hang on." I

Jesus is big on people evolving. And all organisms have an innate tendency to evolve toward improvement. I seem to be the outlier.

had to learn to be present without paying quite so much attention to my poor old overamped mind, because this was the source of most of my unhappiness. And it still is. The

the tradition of artists will continue no matter what form the society takes. And this is another reason to write: people need us, to mirror for them and for each other without distortion—not to look around and say, "Look at yourselves, you idiots!," but to say, "This is who we are.

The harm is in the unwanted help or helping them when they need to figure things out for themselves. Help is the sunny side of control.

I quit my last real job, as a writer at a magazine, when I was twenty-one. That was the moment when I lost my place of prestige on the fast track, and slowly, millimeter by millimeter, I started to get found, to discover who I had been born to be, instead of the impossibly small package, all tied up tightly in myself, that I had agreed to be. That

writing can give you the pleasures of the woodpecker, of hollowing out a hole in a tree where you can build your nest and say, "This is my niche, this is where I live now, this is where I belong.

Goodness and courage are how the divine presents itself so often—whether in drag, as close friends, or as EMTs.

While others who have something to say or who want to be effectual, like musicians or baseball players or politicians, have to get out there in front of people, writers, who tend to be shy, get to stay home and still be public. There are many obvious advantages to this. You don't have to dress up, for instance, and you can't hear them boo you right away.

wish there'd been a shortcut, but the wound

I would rarely be in conformity with the Divine's huge, crazy love so I just prayed, Help me start walking in your general direction, and the greatest prayer, Help me not be such an asshole.

It gets darker and darker, and then Jesus is born." That line came back to me, from out of nowhere, and I decided to practice radical hope, hope in the face of not having a clue.

Life on earth is a head-scratcher for anyone who's paying attention. This place has been a bad match for me since I was four.

The point was to lean toward goodness, to resist less, to pray for our enemies. The point was to have a spiritual awakening of any sort that would help us live more often in kind awareness.

One of the immutable laws of being human is that the people who show up are the right people.

Only God can put Scripture inside. But reading sacred text can put it on your hearts, and then when your hearts break, the holy words will fall inside.

I was raised in a culture that promotes this competitiveness, this insatiability, this fantasy of needing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and then, in the next breath, shames you for any feelings of longing or envy or fear that it will always be someone else's turn. I was only doing what I had been groomed to do.

One of the things that happens when you give yourself permission to sart writing is that you start thinking like a writer

Forgiveness and mercy mean that, bit by bit, you begin to outshine the resentment.

Science, art, community, and nature make manifest that bad will or mistakes can lead to progress, like Bob Ross on his show The Joy of Painting reminding us that when we make big mistakes on canvas, we can turn them into birds—"Yeah, they're birds now!

Look at us," he said. His speech was difficult to understand, thick and slow as a warped record. His two friends in the picture had Down's syndrome. All three of them looked extremely pleased with themselves. I admired the picture and then handed it back to him. He stopped, so I stopped, too. He pointed to his own image. "That," he said, "is one cool man.

I suddenly have two stomachs—a regular tummy and another one below that, which I call the subcontinent. This older body is both amazingly healthy and a big disappointment.

I want to hear someone remind me that if I want to have loving feelings, I need to do loving things. I want someone to make me laugh about our shared humanity and cuckooness; I want someone to remind me that laughter is carbonated holiness.