Anne Lamott Quotes

I used to tell my writing students that they must write the books they wished they could come upon - because then the books they hungered and thirsted for would exist.

I used to love to untangle chains when I was a child. I had thin, busy fingers, and I never gave up. Perhaps there was a psychiatric component to my concentration but like much of my psychic damage, this worked to everyone's advantage.

Bananas are great, as I believe them to be the only known cure for existential dread. Also, Mother Teresa said that in India, a woman dying in the street will share her banana with anyone who needs it, whereas in America, people amass and hoard as many bananas as they can to sell for an exorbitant p

A whole lot of us believers, of all different religions, are ready to turn back the tide of madness by walking together, in both the dark and the light - in other words, through life - registering voters as we go, and keeping the faith.

Pay attention to the beauty surrounding you.

I am going to try to pay attention to the spring. I am going to look around at all the flowers, and look up at the hectic trees. I am going to close my eyes and listen.

I accidentally forgot to graduate from college.

There is nothing as sweet as a comeback, when you are down and out, about to lose, and out of time.

It's a great time to be alive.

When hope is not pinned wriggling onto a shiny image or expectation, it sometimes floats forth and opens.

I see that children fill the existential hollowness many people feel; that when we have children, we know they will need us, and maybe love us, but we don't have a clue how hard it is going to be.

I don't want something special. I want something beautifully plain.

Your experiences will be yours alone. But truth and best friendship will rarely if ever disappoint you.

The first holy truth in God 101 is that men and women of true faith have always had to accept the mystery of God's identity and love and ways. I hate that, but it's the truth.

Some people won't go the extra mile, and then on their birthday, when no one makes a fuss, they feel neglected and bitter.

I loved every second of Catholic church. I loved the sickly sweet rotting-pomegranate smells of the incense. I loved the overwrought altar, the birdbath of holy water, the votive candles; I loved that there was a poor box, the stations of the cross rendered in stained glass on the windows.

Nothing heals us like letting people know our scariest parts: When people listen to you cry and lament, and look at you with love, it's like they are holding the baby of you.

When we're dealing with the people in our family - no matter how annoying or gross they may be, no matter how self-inflicted their suffering may appear, no matter how afflicted they are with ignorance, prejudice or nose hairs - we give from the deepest parts of ourselves.

If you don't die of thirst, there are blessings in the desert. You can be pulled into limitlessness, which we all yearn for, or you can do the beauty of minutiae, the scrimshaw of tiny and precise. The sky is your ocean, and the crystal silence will uplift you like great gospel music, or Neil Young.

The reason I never give up hope is because everything is so basically hopeless.

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.

My parents, and librarians along the way, taught me about the space between words; about the margins, where so many juicy moments of life and spirit and friendship could be found. In a library, you could find miracles and truth and you might find something that would make you laugh so hard that you

Your problem is how you are going to spend this one odd and precious life you have been issued. Whether you're going to spend it trying to look good and creating the illusion that you have power over people and circumstances, or whether you are going to taste it, enjoy it and find out the truth abou

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.

You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.