Quotes from Anne Lamott

grace can be the experience of a second wind, when even though what you want is clarity and resolution, what you get is stamina and poignancy and the strength to hang on.

good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are.

In recovery, they say there are no victims, only volunteers, […]

Hospice is the Calvary, Hospice means death is not going to be nearly as bad as you think

Play is also part of developing trust. Play opens the heart and gives delight and focus, like an abacus did when we were young.

God's joy moves from unmarked box to unmarked box, from cell to cell. As rainwater, down into flowerbed. As roses, up from ground. Now it looks like a plate of rice and fish, now a cliff covered with vines, now a horse being saddled. It hides within these, till one day it cracks them open.

We said that we believed that the truth would set us free, and the truth was that the Sunday-school staff was burned out, that there were almost no people of color, and that if we didn't get more help, we'd have to close down.

Even as we improved as teachers and as students, the children continued to have raging impulse-control problems; the very thing that made them spontaneous and immediate could also make them mean...The other teachers and I had dreamed of taking the kids on field trips, to remove them from the grip and tangle of life -- of a day on the beach; of sandy, sacramental hot dogs; of playing in the ocean, making sculptures, and drawing with sticks. But we could barely manage them in class.

Don't get me wrong: grief sucks, it really does. Unfortunately, though, avoiding it robs us of life, of the now, of a sense of living spirit.

You can't logically get from where we were to where we are now. I think that is what they mean by grace.

Teaching] was hard. Some of the kids were needy and vulnerable and depressed, with faces of dubious, aged concern, rumpled foreheads, downcast or shuttered eyes. Some were wild. We did not exclude anyone, because Jesus didn't. On bad days, I could not imagine what he had been thinking. I could always feel Jesus in the room, encouraging us in every way, although maybe he would have stopped short of sharing Doritos with us.

Toni Morrison said, "The function of freedom is to free someone else," and if you are no longer wracked or in bondage to a person or a way of life, tell your story. Risk freeing someone else.

Just take it bird by bird

As the mystics would have us believe, "As above, so below, as within, so without, as the universe, so the soul.

We write to expose the unexposed

In biblical times, they used to stone a few thirteen-year-olds with some regularity, which helped keep the others quiet and at home. The mothers were usually in the first row of stone throwers, and had to be restrained.

New is life.

a good marriage is one in which each spouse secretly thinks he or she got the better deal, and this is true also of our bosom friendships. You could almost flush with appreciation. What a great scam, to have gotten people of such extreme quality and loyalty to think you are stuck with them. Oh my God. Thank you

I tried to cooperate with grace, which is to say, I did not turn on the TV.

Deep is so un-American now, even radical. We live too often like water skeeters on the surface of the pond, dropping down for a quick bite of insect or e-mail. Deep is the realm of soul.

This is parenting on steroids.

See how the fearful chandelier Trembles above you Each time you open your mouth To sing. Sing. —DONALD JUSTICE

God makes a way out of no way.

may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.