Quotes from Anne Lamott

He started to explain his position, trying to get me to engage. I secretly shut my heart to him completely. I forgot that this hurts only me.

All those years I fell for the great palace lie that grief should be gotten over as quickly as possible and as privately. But what I've discovered since is that the lifelong fear of grief keeps us in a barren, isolated place and that only grieving can heal grief; the passage of time will lessen the acuteness, but time alone, without the direct experience of grief, will not heal it.

The neck is where it all shows. Like the thighs of the head.

I'm pretty sure that it is only by experiencing that ocean of sadness in a naked and immediate way that we come to be healed—which is to say, that we come to experience life with a real sense of presence and spaciousness and peace.

The world is always going to be dangerous, and people get badly banged up, but how can there be more meaning than helping one another stand up in a wind and stay warm?

Kill the pain. I don't smoke or drink anymore. I'm too worried to gamble, too guilty to shoplift, and I've always hated clothes shopping. So what choices did that leave? I could go on a strict new diet or conversely, I could stuff myself to the rafters with fat, sugar and carcinogens. Ding! Ding! We have a winner.

God's love is not the same as human love. [Our] love...is fraught with conditions, delusion, and judgment.

And third, he makes me stronger, because you have to balance so much now—you have to reschedule everything you have to do—homework and him. It forces you to tap into more of you than you knew was there—parts that you didn't even know you had.

Love can bring people out of isolation, get them to take off the Halloween masks they wear, breathing through the slits.

spring, we expand and stretch in all directions. It's green exuberance and giddiness, bright clown colors and

In spring, we expand and stretch in all directions. It's green exuberance and giddiness, bright clown colors and Easter colors, too; the rebirth of the tender growing soul.

The one truth that would help us begin to solve our ethical and political problems [is] that we are all more or less wrong, that we are all at fault, all limited and obstructed by our mixed motives, our self-deception, our greed, our self-righteousness and our tendency to aggression and hypocrisy.

This is not a bad line to have taped to the wall of your office. Say to yourself in the kindest possible way, Look, honey, all we're going to do for now is to write a description of the river at sunrise, or the young child swimming in the pool at the club, or the first time the man sees the woman he will marry. That is all we are going to do for now. We are just going to take this bird by bird. But we are going to finish this one short assignment.

This menagerie - it was part of my being repented - to show up places where I might have been afraid, like the zoo or a marriage.

Then Mason made an astonishing comment. He said to the girl, adamantly, in his slightly garbled and mumbly way, "You know, I used to have brain cancer. I was in a coma, and then I was here again." I had to close my eyes at the beauty of his understanding—that he was here again. He had woken up, as we are all called to do. I said, "You are a miracle.

I came into this world with mercy for nearly everyone, everywhere, and for all cats and dogs at the pound. A fat lot of good it did me. By five years old, I had migraines and the first signs of OCD. By about age six, along with innocence and wonder and truth, I put away childish things. They said to, the people in charge of keeping me alive. I did.

to search for God is to have found God is deeply profound, because the belief we hold in the existence of another world opens space within us, and around us, which creates a more radiant reality.

My parents, teachers, and the culture I grew up in showed me a drawer in which to stuff my merciful nature, because mercy made me look vulnerable and foolish, and it made me less productive. It was distracting to focus worried eyes on others instead of on homework, and on poor Dad, after all he had done for us, and on the prize of making the whole family look good.

know there's solace in making do with what you've got, making things a little bit better. What might have been thrown out went from tattered scraps to something majestic and goofy and honest that holds together, that keeps people's eyes off me and my family, yet lets in the light and sun, like a poem or a song.

The search is the meaning, the search for beauty, love, kindness and restoration in this difficult, wired and often alien modern world. The miracle is that we are here, that no matter how undone we've been the night before, we wake up every morning and are still here. It is phenomenal just to be.

A story does not need to be hot. Stories are usually about a modest salvation.

Where inside them does awe arise? Soul is a place- the innermost Russian nesting doll.

Death is...usually doable, astonishing but plain.

It's like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony