Quotes About Anne Lamott

I'd read in Anne Lamott's Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith,

I thought such awful thoughts that I cannot even say them out loud because they would make Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish.

I'm drawn to almost any piece of writing with the words 'divine love' and 'impeachment' in the first sentence. But I know the word 'divine' makes many progressive people run screaming for their cute little lives, and so one hesitates to use it.

But my subconscious mind--the part I've heard writers call the lizard brain--could and did: it told me to reach for Anne Lamott or Edith Wharton or Calvin Trillin instead. And if I've learned one thing in my decades on earth, it's this: Don't argue with your lizard brain; it knows you better than you know yourself.

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.

Toddlers can make you feel as if you have violated some archaic law in their personal Koran and you should die, infidel.

My favorite moment in Jeanne Moreau's latest movie--a comedy called The Summer House --takes place in a kitchen, when she proclaims that every human has something to cry about. When mocked by the owner of the kitchen and pressed to say what it is that we have to cry about, she tosses back her head of flaming red hair and says, The winds of solitude roaring at the edge of infinity.

These are pictures of the people in my family where we look like the most awkward and desperate folk you ever saw, poster children for the human condition.

I naively believe that self-love is 80 percent of the solution, that it helps beyond words to take yourself through the day as you would with your most beloved mental-patient relative, with great humor and lots of small treats.

Life does not seem to present itself to me for my convenience, to box itself up nicely so I can write about it with wisdom and a point to make before putting it on a shelf somewhere.

Does sunset sometimes look like the sun is coming up? Do you know what a faithful love is like? You're crying; you say you've burned yourself. But can you think of anyone who's not hazy with smoke? —Rumi

But be careful: if your intuition says that your story sucks, make sure it really is your intuition and not your mother.

they got to be so conceited because they were Catholics.

It may be one of those miracles where your heart sinks, because you think it means you have lost. But in surrender you have won. And if it were me, after a moment, I would say, Thanks.

Then I thought: Wait—George Bush? And relief washed over me like gentle surf, because believing in George Bush was so ludicrous that believing in God seems almost rational.

shared a belief that we were spiritual beings having human experiences, not vice versa, and that spirit, love, and truth were actual reality

Twenty minutes later, my ski patrol woman did come back, rubbing her bare hands together. "How you doing?" she asked. At first the enthusiasm in her voice worried me, because she sounded as if we might now move on to calisthenics.

I once heard Anne Lamott say, "Help is the sunny side of control." Yes

As Anne Lamott said, "Expectations are resentments waiting to happen.

Reading poetry and reading the great works of the canon that we were reading in the '60s and the '70s and '80s was mind altering.

I don't have very sophisticated taste in music. I listen to a lot of folk music. I like reggae.