Anne Lamott Quotes

Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up.

Mostly things are not that way, that simple and pure, with so much focus given to each syllable of life as life sings itself. But that kind of attention is the prize. To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass — seeing things in such a narrow and darkly narcissistic way that it presents a colo-rectal theology, offering hope to no one.

Pope Francis says the name of God is mercy. Our name was mercy, too, until we put it away to become more productive, more admired and less vulnerable. We tend to forget it's still there.

You want to avoid at all costs drawing your characters on those that already exist in other works of fiction. You must learn about people from people, not from what you read. Your reading should confirm what you’ve observed in the world.

….but at the same time, they got a miracle. It wasn’t the kind that comes on a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day float. And it wasn’t the one that they wanted, where God would reach down from the sky and touch their girl with a magic wand and restore her to perfect health. Maybe that will still happen-who knows? I wouldn’t put anything past God, because he or she is one crafty mother. Still, they did get a miracle, one of those dusty little red-wagon miracles, and they understand this.

When I was young, I used to be so jealous of other girls that it crippled me.

Anything that leaves you more fearful, more isolated, more disconnected from other people, more full of judgment or self-hatred, is not of God, does not follow the Rule of Love — and you should stop doing it.

What if we gave fifty percent of our discretionary budget to the world’s poor and then counted on the moral power of that action to protect us?

When we think we can do it all ourselves — fix, save, buy, or date a nice solution — it's hopeless. We're going to screw things up. We're going to get our tentacles wrapped around things and squirt our squiddy ink all over, so that there is even less visibility, and then we're going to squeeze the very life out of everything.

I knew to put on my favorite earrings. Sometimes you start with the outside and you get it right. You tend to your spirit through the body.

Kids are hard -they drive you crazy and break your heart- whereas grandchildren make you feel great about life, and yourself, and your ability to love someone unconditionally, finally, after all these years.

Say it's true: It is what it is. We're social, tribal, musical animals, walking percussion instruments. Most of us do the best we can. We show up. We strive for gratitude, and try not to be such babies.

So I pray for people who are hurting, that they be filled with air and light. Air and light heal; they somehow get into those dark, musty places, like spiritual antibiotics. We don’t have to figure out how this all works — “Figure it out” is not a good slogan. It’s enough to know it does.

One secret of life is that the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day. Another secret is that laughter is carbonated holiness

And she is going to dance, dance hungry, dance full, dance each cold astonishing moment, now when she is young and again when she is old.