Anne Lamott Quotes

I'm here to be me, which is taking a great deal longer than I had hoped.

...because when people have seen you at their worst, you don't have to put on the mask as much.

"No" is a complete sentence.

I do not at all understand the mystery of grace — only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us. I can be received gladly or grudgingly, in big gulps or in tiny tastes, like a deer at the salt.

That's what's so touching about weddings: Two people fall in love, and decide to see if their love might stand up over time, if there might be enough grace and forgiveness and memory lapses to help the whole shebang hang together.

"These lines of D.H. Lawrence are taped to the wall of my office:

"What is the knocking?
What is the knocking at the door in the night?
It is somebody wants to do us harm.

No, no, it is the three strange angels.
Admit them, admit them."

I under[stand] that failure is surely one of these strange angels."

I think we're all pretty crazy on this bus. I'm not sure I know anyone who's got all the dots on his or her dice.

Sometimes grace is a ribbon of mountain air that gets in through the cracks.

It was not facing what life dealt that made you crazy, but rather trying to set life straight where it was unstraightenable.

You can either practice being right or practice being kind.

Rosie [her teenage daughter] had a secret life now, was putting together her own tribe, finding her identity there, and it was great to see, and it hurt like hell.

Gratitude begins in our hearts and then dovetails into behavior. It almost always makes you willing to be of service, which is where the joy resides. It means that you are willing to stop being such a jerk. When you are aware of all that has been given to you, in your lifetime and the past few days, it is hard not to be humbled, and pleased to give back.

For twenty years I have ached to go back home, when there was nobody there to whom I could return.

If you are a writer, or want to be a writer, this is how you spend your days — listening, observing, storing things away, making your isolation pay off. You take home all you've taken in, all that you've overheard, and you turn it into gold. (Or at least you try.)

Certainty is missing the point entirely.