Anne Lamott
...It really IS easier to experience spiritual connection when your life is in the process of coming apart.Collection: Spiritual
I pray not to be such a whiny, self-obsessed baby, and give thanks that I am not quite as bad as I used to be (talk about miracles). Then something comes up, and I overreact and blame and sulk, and it feels like I haven't made any progress at all. But it turns out I'm less of a brat than before, and I hit the reset button much sooner, shake it off, and get my sense if humor back.Collection: Baby
But you don't always get what you want;,you get what you getCollection: Want
Where do we even start on the daily walk of restoration and awakening? We start where we are.Collection: Restoration
You can tell if people are following Jesus, because they are fedding the poor, sharing their wealth, and trying to get everyone medical insurance.Collection: Jesus
God sent Jesus to join the human experience, which means to make a lot of mistakes. Jesus didn't arrive here knowing how to walk. He had fingers and toes, confusion, sexual feelings, crazy human internal processes. He had the same prejudices as the rest of his tribe: he had to learn that the Canaanite woman was a person. He had to suffer the hardships and tedium and setbacks of being a regular person. If he hadn't the incarnation would mean nothing.Collection: Jesus
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.Collection: Writing
You just have to keep getting out of your own way so that whatever it is that wants to be written can use you to write it.Collection: Writing
This business of having been issued a body is deeply confusing... Bodies are so messy and disappointing.Collection: Confusing
I don't have any romantic views of parenting. Every step of the way it's really hard. It's a dangerous world, physically and psychologically.Collection: Views
No matter what circumstances, it's hard to be a parent and maintain a sense of self and identity in the world.Collection: Self
If you have a problem you can solve by throwing money at it, you don't have a very interesting problem.Collection: Money
It's intrusive for grandparents to think they're in charge. It's manipulative. Also, it's self-destructive, since if the parents have to resist you, you won't get your mitts on the kid as often.Collection: Kids
Anything you say from your heart to God is a prayer. But "why" is rarely a useful question. When Job keeps asking God why he has had such loss and suffering, God says, "You wouldn't understand." I always want to know why, and I almost never have a good answer.Collection: Jobs
He told me about his monster. His sounded just like mine without quite so much mascara. When people shine a little light on their monster, we find out how similar most of our monsters are.Collection: Light
I've always thought I could use my brain and my heart to jockey everyone around to the good. But life is not jockeyable. When you try, you make people infinitely crazier than they already were, including or especially yourself.Collection: Heart
Mostly what happens in the novels never happened in real life.Collection: Real
I'm one of those religious people who are afraid of everything. I'm instantly worried about everything that could go wrong.Collection: Religious
A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way. It's a lie if you make something up. But you make it up in the name of truth, and then you give your heart to expressing it clearly.Collection: Lying
You keep working on your piece over and over, trying to get the sections and paragraphs and sentences and the whole just right, but there's a point at which you can tell you've begun hurting the work with your perfectionism. Then you have to release the work to new eyes.Collection: Hurt
Everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, and scared, even the people who seem to have it more or less together. They are much more like you than you would believe. So try not to compare your insides to their outsides.Collection: Believe
... everyone has come to understand that unconditional love is a reality, but with as shelf life of about eight to ten seconds. [p. 110]Collection: Unconditional Love
To be a good writer, you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care. You do not have to have a complicated moral philosophy. But a writer always tries, I think, to be a part of a solution, to understand a little about life and to pass this on.Collection: Philosophy
We cheated, you and me, and someone noticed. I noticed you; someone else noticed me. It hurts us. That's not so bad. So many people cheat. Everywhere on every level. Everyone's cheated. I'm just saying that you don't need to see yourself as a cheater. Because that's not who you are. You're someone who cheated. There's a difference, and you should try to get that difference, or that's who you'll grow up to be.Collection: Hurt
My main problem is that over and over again, I try to get all my characters to say stuff that I think is so witty or erudite you know, so that everybody will go.Collection: Witty
The difference between a writer who toughs it out and one who doesn't is that you push through the parts where you know that you've just written seven pages when all you're looking for is one paragraph.Collection: Differences
You can change the world with a hot bath, if you sink into it from a place of knowing that you are worth profound care, even when you're dirty and rattled.Collection: Dirty
We want a sense that an important character, like a narrator, is reliable. We want to believe that a character is not playing ages or being coy or being manipulative, but is telling the truth to the best of his or her ability...We do not wish to be crudely manipulated...We want to be massaged by a masseur, not whapped by a carpet beater.Collection: Believe
Tell the truth as you understand it. If you're a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act - truth is always subversive.Collection: Truth
Sometimes grace is a ribbon of mountain air that gets in through the cracks.Collection: Air
My idea of everything going smoothly on an airplane is (a) that I not die in a slow-motion fiery crash or get stabbed to death by terrorists and (b) that none of the other passengers try to talk to me. All conversation should end at the moment the wheels leave the ground.Collection: Airplane
These are pictures of the people in my family where we look like the most awkward and desperate folk you ever saw, poster children for the human condition.Collection: Children
Frequently, as so many poets and psalmists and songwriters have said, the invisible shift happens through the broken places.Collection: Broken
There are these people who keep taking you in and feeding you and loving you and making the world a tiny bit safer than it feels. People have community and family, but existentially we are deeply isolated.Collection: People
I naturally prefer the company of people who hold grudges, as long as they are not held against me.Collection: Long
Right foot, left foot, right foot, breathe.Collection: Feet
What an incredible drug fear is.Collection: Fear
There is nothing more touching to me then a family picture where everyone is trying to look his or her best, but you can see what a mess they all really are.Collection: Touching
Greasy food is so comforting when you are hungover.Collection: Comforting
Writing is how I communicate my deepest beliefs, and what I hope are helpful observations about our dual citizenship, as children of God, as regular old mixed-up, worried, flawed, precious human beings.Collection: Children
Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.Collection: Writing
Jealousy is such a direct attack on whatever measure of confidence you’ve been able to muster. But if you continue to write, you are probably going to have to deal with it, because some wonderful, dazzling successes are going to happen for some of the most awful, angry, undeserving writers you know-people who are, in other words, not you.Collection: Writing
I have a giant ego and terrible self-esteem, so I need to hit the re-set button fairly regularly - to get into presence, and humility, and being right-sized.Collection: Self Esteem
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?Collection: What If
I knew that the world was a harsh place, and my family was a mess, and even though I danced as fast as I could, I did not feel welcome, did not feel the great Shalom. THIS WORLD WAS NEVER A GOOD MATCH FOR ME. But my belief was that there was a loving magical energy in the world - seen in Nature's beauty and awesomeness, my best girl and women friends, art, music.Collection: Girl
And my fear of failure has been lifelong and deep. If you are what you do- and I think my parents may have accidentally given me this idea- and you do poorly, what then? It’s over; you’re wiped out. All those prophecies you heard in the dark have come true, and people can see the real you, see what a schmendrick you are, what a fraud.Collection: Real
My theology is based on what I tell my Sunday-school kids - that they are loved and chosen, AS IS, now, today. That the moment is holy, sacred, and all there is - and that we are only as sick as our secrets. So TELL IT.Collection: School
You've got to learn to let go and let your children fall, and fail. If you try to protect them from hurt, and always rush to their side with Band-Aids, they won't learn about life, and what is true, what works, what helps, and what are real consequences of certain kinds of behavior. When they do get hurt, which they will, they won't know how to take care of their grown selves. They won't even know where the aspirin is kept.Collection: Letting Go
I do know the sorrow of being ordinary, and that much of our life is spent doing the crazy mental arithmetic of how, at any given moment, we might improve, or at least disguise or present our defects and screw-ups in either more charming or more intimidating ways.Collection: Crazy