Quotes from Anne Lamott

And while everyone has to make a living and show up for family, listening is optional. You have to make a conscious decision to listen harder.

Haters want us to hate them, because hate is incapacitating.

She told me not long ago, "I'm not suicidal, but sometimes I wish I was dead." This is the point beyond exhaustion, when you can't see how you'll ever fill up again. And then she does, through what she calls lunch-money faith: nothing dramatic, and just enough.

Boy, the young are angry at us. Good. This is what usually changes the world, although it's a new experience to be the us the young are mad at.

my disease wanted me dead, but would settle for getting me drunk...

Identity is a posture that we steal and assemble as a protective coating, but it's also a ski mask, camouflage and protection from the cold.

how most of us are raised to be somebodies and what a no-win game that is to buy into, because while you may turn out to be much more somebody than somebody else, a lot of other people are going to be a lot more somebody than you. And you are going to drive yourself crazy.

a struggle with perfectionism [which is] the most toxic condition for the soul. The next most toxic is the ensuing and chronic contempt for oneself, the belief that one is secretly defective and less-than. The next is the obsession that one is right and better-than.

Polite inclusion is the gateway drug to mercy.

You pay twenty-five dollars to hear one of my heroes, Thich Nhat Hanh, say: "When you walk, just walk." You think: I paid good money for this? Notice your feet as they connect to the earth? Left foot, right foot, breathe? Crazy.

Even my Buddhist friends have been feeling despair and when they go bad, you know the end is nigh.

Sometimes we have to get cancer or have a heart attack to stop the train of wired meaninglessness, to stop faking or stuffing it all back down.

I did the only thing I know to do. I said it. I told the truth...90% of the time this is the solution. Tell it. Cry if you can. If you can't, sit in a dejected posture hunched over and stay with this a while. It will shift and become less acute.

The only thing to do when the sense of dread and low self-esteem tells you that you are not up to this is to wear it down by getting a little work done every day. You really can do it, really can find these people inside you and learn to hear what they have to say.

with the animals dying around us our lost feelings we are saying thank you with the forests falling faster than the minutes of our lives we are saying thank you with the words going out like cells of a brain with the cities growing over us like the earth we are saying thank you faster and faster with nobody listening we are saying thank you we are saying thank you and waving dark though it is —W. S. MERWIN

It means, of course, that when you don't know what to do, when you don't know whether your character would do this or that, you get quiet and try to hear that still small voice inside. It will tell you what to do.

But with antibiotics and technology came great expectations, of being able to keep our children safe, of living long and healthy lives, relaxed and content and able to keep up the car payments. Even with the Internet, deciphering the genetic code, and great advances in immunotherapy, life is frequently confusing at best, and guaranteed to be hard and weird and sad at times.

Fog was the moon's cousin, like nurses with cool compresses for her temples, and she drove out to Point Reyes, and there was fog, and it was good.

The last word will not be our bad thoughts and behavior, but mercy, love, and forgiveness.

You get your confidence and intuition back by trusting yourself, by being militantly on your own side. You need to trust yourself, especially on a first draft, where amid the anxiety and self-doubt, there should be a real sense of your imagination and your memories walking and woolgathering, tramping the hills, romping all over the place. Trust them. Don't look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.

thinking about A. J. Muste, who during the Vietnam War stood in front of the White House night after night with a candle. One rainy night, a reporter asked him, "Mr. Muste, do you really think you are going to change the policies of this country by standing out here alone at night with a candle?" "Oh," Muste replied, "I don't do it to change the country, I do it so the country won't change me.

My elderly priest friend Terry says, "Don't try harder—resist less.

Here we are, older, scared, numb on some days, enraged on others, with even less trust than we had a year ago. The devastating pandemic, and the federal government's confused and deadly response, was simply the final straw to a few years of crushing developments.

Whether it's Mount Sinai, a pasture, a library, the creek down the road, aliveness (or whatever you want to call it) the song is above us, around us, within us. We transcend the incessant and wearying yammer of bullshit. Transcendence means you go from judgment, separation from life and yourself, to feeling at one-ish with the universe. We hook into something bigger than we are, truer than the self-serving stories we make up about life and ourselves.