Anne Lamott
Jealousy always has been my cross, the weakness and woundedness in me that has most often caused me to feel ugly and unlovable, like the Bad Seed. I’ve had many years of recovery and therapy, years filled with intimate and devoted friendships, yet I still struggle. I know that when someone gets a big slice of pie, it doesn’t mean there’s less for me. In fact, I know that there isn’t even a pie, that there’s plenty to go around, enough food and love and air. But I don’t believe it for a second. I secretly believe there’s a pie. I will go to my grave brandishing my fork.Collection: Believe
When you pray, you are not starting the conversation from scratch, just remembering to plug back into a conversation that's always in progress.Collection: Progress
This is a very violent place to live, the Earth, and we're a very violent species. Cain is still killing Abel. We see that every day.Collection: Cain
Life is like a recycling center, where all the concerns and dramas of humankind get recycled back and forth across the universe. But what you have to offer is your own sensibility, maybe your own sense of humor or insider pathos or meaning. All of us can sing the same song, and there will still be four billion different renditions.Collection: Song
You have to keep taking the next necessary stitch, and the next one, and the next. Without stitches, you just have rags. And we are not rags.Collection: Rags
You want to protect your child from pain, and what you get instead is life, and grace; and though theologians insist that grace is freely given, the truth is that sometimes you pay for it through the nose. And you can't pay your child's way.Collection: Children
The opposite of faith is not doubt, it’s certainty.Collection: Opposites
Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something—anything—down on paper. What I’ve learned to do when I sit down to work on a shitty first draft is to quiet the voices in my head.Collection: Writing
I know that if I feel any deprivation or fear [about money], the solution is to give. The solution is to go find some mothers on the streets of San Raphael and give them tens and twenties and mail off another $50 to Doctors Without Borders to use for the refugees in Kosovo. Because I know that giving is the way we can feel abundant. Giving is the way that we fill ourselves up.... For me the way to fill up is through service and sharing and getting myself to give more than I feel comfortable giving.Collection: Mother
Publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is.Collection: Writing
On the spiritual path, all the dreck and misery is transformed, maybe not that same day, but still transformed into spiritual fuel or insight.Collection: Spiritual
There is nothing you can buy, achieve, own, or rent that can fill up that hunger inside for a sense of fulfillment and wonder.Collection: Dream
I wish grace and healing were more abracadabra kind of things. Also, that delicate silver bells would ring to announce grace's arrival. But no, it's clog and slog and scootch, on the floor, in the silence, in the dark.Collection: Healing
Little by little, in telling Sam all these details, I got to see the bigger point of baseball, that it can give us back ourselves. We’re a crowd animal, a highly gregarious, communicative species, but the culture and the age and all the fear that fills our days have put almost everyone into little boxes, each of us all alone. But baseball, if we love it, gives us back our place in the crowd. It restores us.Collection: Baseball
Left to my own devices, would I trade this for firm thighs, fewer wrinkles, a better memory? On some days. That's why it's such a blessing I'm not left to my own devices. Because the truth is I have amazing friends and a deep faith in God, to whom I can turn. I have a cool kid, a sweet boyfriend, darling pets. I've learned to pay attention to life, and to listen. I'd give up all this for a flatter belly? Are you crazy?Collection: Inspiring
I just can't get over how much babies cry. I really had no idea what I was getting into. To tell you the truth, I thought it would be more like getting a cat.Collection: Baby
Expectations are resentment waiting to happen.Collection: Expectations
Peace is joy at rest. Joy is peace on its feet. quoting her pastor in Salon, April 25, 2003Collection: Feet
I'm a terrible Christian and meditating is very hard for me, and I do it. I do it badly, like I do a lot of things. I believe in doing things badly.Collection: Christian
I don't write about the intimate details of my cousins and aunts and uncles, and my mother and my father because it's not right to, for me.Collection: Mother
There are moments when I am writing when I think that if other people knew how I felt right now, they’d burn me at the stake for feeling so good, so full, so much intense pleasure.Collection: Writing
Charles had once remarked that holding onto a resentment was like eating rat poison and waiting for the rat to die.Collection: Drinking
Having a baby is like suddenly getting the world's worst roommate.Collection: Baby
Laughter is the key that grace has arrived.Collection: Laughter
'Help' is a prayer that is always answered.Collection: Prayer
It was not facing what life dealt that made you crazy, but rather trying to set life straight where it was unstraightenable.Collection: Crazy
My heart was broken and my head was just barely inhabitableCollection: Heart
Radical self-care is quantum, and radiates out into the atmosphere, like a little fresh air.Collection: Air
My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I’m grateful for it the way I’m grateful for the ocean.Collection: Gratitude
Certainty is missing the point entirely.Collection: Missing
When you make friends with fear, it can’t rule you.Collection: Ghouls
I get thirsty people glasses of water, even if that thirsty person is just me.Collection: Glasses
Joy is the best makeup. But a little lipstick is a close runner-up.Collection: Makeup
Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.Collection: Book
If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. Otherwise, you'll just be rearranging furniture in rooms you've already been in.Collection: Courage
...because when people have seen you at their worst, you don't have to put on the mask as much.Collection: People
So Rita and I decided that the most subversive, revolutionary thing I could do was to show up for my life and not be ashamed.Collection: Revolutionary
Teenagers who do not go to church are adored by God, but they don't get to meet some of the people who love God back.Collection: Inspirational
Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you're conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader. He or she will recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of.Collection: Real
She felt as if the mosaic she had been assembling out of life's little shards got dumped to the ground, and there was no way to put it back together.Collection: Together
There is something so tender about this to me, about being willing to have your makeup wash off, your eyes tear up, your nose start to run. Its tender partly because it harkens back to infancy, to your mother washing your face with love and lots or water, tending to you, making you clean all over again.Collection: Mother
I devoured books like a person taking vitamins, afraid that otherwise I would remain this gelatinous narcissist, with no possibility of ever becoming thoughtful, of ever being taken seriously.Collection: Taken
I've given guys blow jobs just because I've run out of things to talk about.' Oh, Rae. Who hasn'tCollection: Running
by then I'd figured out the gift of failure, which is that it breaks through all that held breath and isometric tension about needing to look good: it's the gift of feeling floppier.Collection: Break Through
The solution is always spiritual, and it almost never has anything to do with the problem ... laughter is carbonated holiness.Collection: Spiritual
If you are writing the clearest, truest words you can find and doing the best you can to understand and communicate, this will shine on paper like its own little lighthouse. Lighthouses dont go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.Collection: Running
I was raised by my parents to believe that you had a moral obligation to try and save the world. You sent money to the Red Cross, you registered people to vote, you marched in rallies, stood in vigils, picked up litter.Collection: Believe
The evidence is in, and you are the verdict.Collection: Evidence
When hope is not pinned wriggling onto a shiny image or expectation, it sometimes floats forth and opens like one of those fluted Japanese blossoms, flimsy and spastic, bright and warm. This almost always seems to happen in community.Collection: Faith