Quotes from Anne Lamott

I see that children fill the existential hollowness many people feel; that when we have children, we know they will need us, and maybe love us, but we don't have a clue how hard it is going to be.

[S]he believed that the Buddhists were right–that if you want, you will suffer; if you love, you will grieve. (68)

Every woman's path is difficult, and many mothers were as equipped to raise children as wire monkey mothers. I say that without judgment: It is, sadly, true. An unhealthy mother's love is withering.

Evangelical Christians and I can sit down and talk one on one about how much we love Jesus, and yet I'm not carried in Christian bookstores.

I am an Aries. Although I do not believe in astrology, I think this is exactly the right sign to have been born under.

E-books are great for instant gratification - you see a review somewhere of a book that interests you, and you can start reading it five minutes later.

Summer nearly does me in every year. It's too hot and the light is unforgiving and the days go on way too long.

I've known for years that resentments don't hurt the person we resent, but they do hurt us.

Most marriages are a mess, and the children get caught between two bitter, antagonistic parents. My parents stayed married for 27 unhappy years, till their kids were grown, and this was a catastrophe for us.

The truth of my experience is that we are all a lot more alike than we are different.

...after a few days at the desk, telling the truth in an interesting way turns out to be as easy and pleasurable as bathing a cat.

The truth is that progress is usually small and sneaky.

I have been somebody who has not written a great deal about the truth of my family's life.

You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.

If you're lucky you find your way into a spiritual community and you start to find the great teachers of all the ages who said the same thing. There's only love, you're made of love.

Sam said to me the other day, "I love you like 20 tyrannosauruses on 20 mountaintops," and this is the exact same way in which I love him.

If you don't die of thirst, there are blessings in the desert. You can be pulled into limitlessness, which we all yearn for, or you can do the beauty of minutiae, the scrimshaw of tiny and precise. The sky is your ocean, and the crystal silence will uplift you like great gospel music, or Neil Young.

But 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.

You are going to love some of your characters because they are you or some facet of you, and you are going to hate some of your characters for the same reason.

Grace is having a commitment to- or at least an acceptance of- being ineffective and foolish. That our bottled charm is the main roadblock to drinking that clear cool glass of love.

Learning to love back is the hardest part of being alive.

I believe that discipline and self-love are the total secrets to freedom.

I happen to be a Christian, but I know that there is one God. People worshipping goodness and love and kindness and truth are worshipping the same God.

We can't understand when we're pregnant, or when our siblings are expecting, how profound it is to have a shared history with a younger generation: blood, genes, humor. It means we were actually here, on Earth, for a time - like the Egyptians with their pyramids, only with children.