Anne Lamott Quotes

Don't look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.

We all know we're going to die; what's important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this.

"There's a lovely Hasidic story of a rabbi who always told his people that if they studied the Torah, it would put Scripture on their hearts. One of them asked, "Why on our hearts, and not in them?" The rabbi answered, "Only God can put Scripture inside. But reading sacred text can put it on your heart, and then when your hearts break, the holy words will fall inside.

If you have a body, you are entitled to the full range of feelings. It comes with the package.

...the three things I cannot change are the past, the truth, and you.

I worry that Jesus drinks himself to sleep when he hears me talk like this.

My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I’m grateful for it the way I’m grateful for the ocean.

...most of the time, all you have is the moment, and the imperfect love of the people around you.

Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.

It is unearned love — the love that goes before, that greets us on the way. It's the help you receive when you have no bright ideas left, when you are empty and desperate and have discovered that your best thinking and most charming charm have failed you. Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there.

Perfection is shallow, unreal, and fatally uninteresting.

Never compare your insides to everyone else's outsides.

I've given guys blow jobs just because I've run out of things to talk about.'
Oh, Rae. Who hasn't

...since you can't heal your own sick mind with your own sick mind, I needed to consult somebody else's sick mind.

You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the rational mind. The rational mind doesn't nourish you. You assume that it gives you the truth, because the rational mind is the golden calf that this culture worships, but this is not true. Rationality squeezes out much that is rich and juicy and fascinating.