Quotes from Anne Lamott

surrender means you get to come on over to the winning side.

What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you.

Topsy-turvy is often a symptom for the presence of God--the last become first, the hungry are fed, the obnoxious are welcomed.

Never give up on intimate friendships or science or nature. They have always saved us, and they will again. And love is the mastermind of it all... We need to stop racing and to savor beauty, to look up from our screens at the weather, one another's faces, the ocean, the desert, a garden, and architecture, which is another kind of garden.

Keep walking, though there's no place to get to. Don't try to see through the distances. That's not for human beings. Move within, but don't move the way fear makes you move. Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened. Don't open the door to the study and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument. Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

T. S. Eliot wrote, 'Teach us to care and not to care / Teach us to sit still.' We long for this, and yet we check our smartphones every ten minutes for news, texts, distraction.

Look around and see whom you can serve. This will fill you.

We can change. People say we can't, but we do when the the stakes or the pain is high enough.

Play is learning how to wait, how to applaud someone else's success, how to let others go first. It's reciprocity and laughter. It's very simple and it brings us deeply into the Now, and just for a while, maybe for the rest of the day, you don't have to judge yourself or kill anyone.

we won't love you if you're perfect

Toddlers can make you feel as if you have violated some archaic law in their personal Koran and you should die, infidel. Other times they'll reach out and touch you like adoring grandparents on their deathbeds, trying to memorize your face with their fingers.

I accidentally forgot to graduate from college.

I went to church with my grandparents sometimes and I loved it.

I didn't write about my mother much in the third year after she died. I was still trying to get my argument straight: When her friends or our relatives wondered why I was still so hard on her, I could really lay out the case for what it had been like to be raised by someone who had loathed herself, her husband, even her own name.

And that almost everyone was struggling to wake up, to be loved, and not feel so afraid all the time. That's what the cars, degrees, booze, and drugs were about.

It's a great time to be alive.

The American way is to not need help, but to help.

I used to love to untangle chains when I was a child. I had thin, busy fingers, and I never gave up. Perhaps there was a psychiatric component to my concentration but like much of my psychic damage, this worked to everyone's advantage.

There is nothing as sweet as a comeback, when you are down and out, about to lose, and out of time.

I don't think you have time to waste not writing because you are afraid you won't be good at it.

I like the desert for short periods of time, from inside a car, with the windows rolled up, and the doors locked. I prefer beach resorts with room service.

My father really taught me that you really develop the habit of writing and you sit down at the same time every day, you don't wait for inspiration.

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.

I spend most of my time alone, because I so value and thrive in the quiet. Heaven.