Quotes from Anne Lamott

I walked to the lip of the water and let the foamy tongue of the rushing liquid lick my toes. A sand crab burrowed a hole a few inches from my foot and then disappeared into the damp sand.…

And the story begins to materialize, and another thing is happening, which is that you are learning what you aren't writing, and this is helping you to find out what you are writing.

And if there was something to be grokked—a vibrational core in us, a consciousness, an essential self, that was not our charm and successes—then didn't it mean there was some kind of capital-T Truth to seek?

An early spring arrived, with skies of faded-workshirt blue.

You unconscious can't work when youare breathing down it's neck. You'll sit there going, Are you done in there yet? Are you done in there yet?. But it is trying to tell you nicely, Shut up and go away.

Sometimes this human stuff is slimy and pathetic—jealousy especially so—but better to feel it and talk about it and walk through it than to spend a lifetime being silently poisoned.

Your unconscious can't work when you are breathing down it's neck. You'll sit there going, Are you done in there yet? Are you done in there yet?. But it is trying to tell you nicely, Shut up and go away.

Mattie saw herself and Angela as the trees that grew out of cliffs and boulders above the ocean near Monterey—evergreen creatures, windswept, magnificent, twisty, gnarled pines growing out of the layers of rock, where maybe there had once been some nutrition, maybe there had once been soil from which the trees had sprung, but then the soil had blown away, and they still grew.

Nothing worked consistently anymore, not the illusion or the self-made glue that had held them together, not even the armature of habit. For years, when she

on creative work] If you give freely there will always be more. This is a radical proposition that runs so contrary to human nature, or at least to my nature, that I personally keep trying to find loopholes in it. But it is only when I go ahead and decide to shoot my literary, creative wad on a daily basis that I get any sense of full presence, of being Zorba the Greek at the keyboard.

When you're feeling low, you don't want anyone even to joke that you may be in some kind of astrological strike zone where you'll be for the next seven years. On a bad day you also don't need a lot of advice. You just need a little empathy and affirmation." ~ @ANNELAMOTT

when all is said and done, we are all just walking each other home.

I have a quote taped to my office wall from an anonymous source that says, 'Love is hard. Love is ... seeing the darkness in another person and defying the impulse to jump ship.

He said that when he sees little kids sitting in the backseat of cars, in those car seats that have steering wheels, with grim expressions of concentration on their faces, clearly convinced that their efforts are causing the car to do whatever it is doing, he thinks of himself and his relationship with God: God who drives along silently, gently amused, in the real driver's seat.

Like the Buddha and Jesus, who knew they couldn't control our lives, but could infuse lives with their selves, we have been graced with a few people.

You show up as is, hangdog, skeptical, pissy, or superior. Someone welcomes you and pats the seat next to them. Someone will get other people water, or watch the kids, or do a neighbor's laundry, or wash somebody's feet.

So I'd start writing without reining myself in. It was almost just typing, just making my fingers move. And the writing would be terrible.

Your three-year-old and your work in progress teach you to give. They teach you to get out of yourself and become a person for someone else. This is probably the secret to happiness. So that's one reason to write. Your child and your work hold you hostage, suck you dry, ruin your sleep, mess with your head, treat you like dirt, and then you discover they've given you that gold nugget you were looking for all along.

Sometimes - oh, just once in a blue moon-I resist being receptive to God's generosity, because I'm busy with a project and trying to manipulate Him or Her into helping me with it, or with getting my toys fixed or any major discomfort to pass. But God is not a banker or a bean counter. God gives us even more, which is so subversive. God just gives, to us, to you and me. I mean, look at us! Yikes. God keeps giving, forgiving, and inviting us back.

Rilke wrote: "I want to unfold. I don't want to stay folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie.

And there are also the dogs: let's not forget the dogs, the dogs in their pen who will surely hurtle and snarl their way out if you ever stop writing, because writing is, for some of us, the latch that keeps the door of the pen closed, keeps those crazy ravenous dogs contained.

I need to bring up radio station KFKD, or K-Fucked, here. It is perhaps the single greatest obstacle to listening to your broccoli that exists for writers.

You can either leave something for people, or you can leave something in people.

Augustine's insight that 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. A radiance is inside us, just as it is visible outside us, and to seek it is maybe to catch a glimpse from time to time of a light within, of a candle at the window of our heart, of a home somewhere inside.