Anne Lamott Quotes

What helps is that we are not all crazy and hopeless on the same day.

A sober friend from Texas said once that the three things I cannot change are the past, the truth, and you. I hate this insight so much.

I learned that opening myself to my own love and to life’s tough loveliness not only was the most delicious, amazing thing on earth but also was quantum. It would radiate out to a cold, hungry world. Beautiful moments heal, as do real cocoa, Pete Seeger, a walk on old fire roads.

Mercy is radical kindness. Mercy means offering or being offered aid in desperate straits. Mercy is not deserved. It involves absolving the unabsolvable, forgiving the unforgivable. Mercy brings us to the miracle of apology, given and accepted, to unashamed humility when we have erred or forgotten.

The speaker at the meeting, a blonde woman in a fine tailored suit, shared how alcoholism had stolen her own childhood, and had now come back for her child.

There’s freedom in hitting bottom, in seeing that you won’t be able to save or rescue your daughter, her spouse, his parents, or your career, relief in admitting you’ve reached the place of great unknowing. This is where restoration can begin, because when you’re still in the state of trying to fix the unfixable, everything bad is engaged: the chatter of your mind, the tension of your physiology, all the trunks and wheel-ons you carry from the past. It’s exhausting, crazy-making.

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.

whenever the world throws rose petals at you, which thrill and seduce the ego, beware. The cosmic banana peel is suddenly going to appear underfoot to make sure you don’t take it all too seriously, that you don’t fill up on junk food.

I tell my students that the odds of their getting published and of it bringing them financial security, peace of mind, and even joy are probably not that great. Ruin, hysteria, bad skin, unsightly tics, ugly financial problems, maybe; but probably not peace of mind. I tell them that I think they ought to write anyway.

If courage is not there, if the possibility of things getting better is not there, listen a little harder.

The welcome book would have taught us that power and signs of status can’t save us, that welcome — both offering and receiving — is our source of safety. Various chapters and verses of this book would remind us that we are wanted and even occasionally delighted in, despite the unfortunate truth that we are greedy-grabby, self-referential, indulgent, overly judgmental, and often hysterical. Somehow that book “went missing.” Or when the editorial board of bishops pored over the canonical lists from Jerusalem and Alexandria, they arbitrarily nixed the book that states unequivocally that you are wanted, even rejoiced in.

Mark Twain said that Adam was the only man who, when he said a good thing, knew that nobody had said it before.

Into every life crap will fall. Most of us do as well as possible, and some of it works okay, and we try to release that which doesn’t and which is never going to.

Writing like this is a little like milking a cow: the milk is so rich and delicious, and the cow is so glad you did it.

She wears latex bicycle shorts nearly every day, and I will tell you why: because she can. I consider it an act of aggression against the rest of us mothers who forgot to start working out after we had kids.