Anne Lamott
Write as if your parents are dead.Collection: Writing
Sometimes, no matter how screwed up things seem, I feel like we're all at a wedding. But you can't just come out and say, We're at a wedding! Have some cake! You need to create a world into which we can enter, a world where we can see this.Collection: Cake
...since you can't heal your own sick mind with your own sick mind, I needed to consult somebody else's sick mind.Collection: Sick
I realized I was going to get through this disappointing service, and anyway, you have to be somewhere: better here, where I have heard truth spoken so often, than, say, at the DMV, or home alone, orbiting my own mind. And it's good to be out where others can see you, so you can't be your ghastly spoiled self. It forces you to act slightly more elegantly, and this improves your thoughts, and thereby the world.Collection: Home
Looking back on the God my friend believed in, he seems a little erratic, not entirely unlike her father - God as borderline personality.Collection: God
if you want to know how God feels about money, look at whom she gives it to.Collection: God
Now, if you ask me, what’s going on is that we’re all up to here in it, and probably the most important thing is that we not yell at one another.Collection: Important
Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something-anything-down on paper. A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft-you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft-you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it's loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.Collection: Writing
For some of us, good books and beautiful writing are our ultimate solace, even more comforting than exquisite food.Collection: Beautiful
My writer friends, and they are legion, do not go around beaming with quiet feelings of contentment. Most of them go around with haunted, abused, surprised looks on their faces, like lab dogs on whom very personal deodorant sprays have been tested.Collection: Dog
A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way.Collection: Lying
I wish there were shortcuts to wisdom and self-knowledge: cuter abysses or three-day spa wilderness experiences. Sadly, it doesn't work that way. I so resent this.Collection: Wisdom
Here are the two best prayers I know: 'Help me, help me, help me,' and 'Thank you, thank you, thank you.' A woman I know says, for her morning prayer, 'Whatever,' and then for the evening, 'Oh, well,' but has conceded that these prayers are more palatable for people without children.Collection: Morning
Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers.Collection: Prayer
I have a lot of faith. But I am also afraid a lot, and have no real certainty about anything. I remembered something Father Tom had told me--that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns.Collection: Father
Dogs are the closest we come to knowing the divine love of God on this side of eternity.Collection: Dog
Age has given me what I was looking for my entire life - it gave me me. It provided the time and experience and failures and triumphs and friends who helped me step into the shape that had been waiting for me all my life...I not only get along with me most of the time now, I am militantly and maternally on my own side.Collection: Waiting
A good marriage is where both people feel like they're getting the better end of the deal.Collection: Love
... the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day. [pp. 65-66]Collection: Nuts
Everything was coming together by coming apart . . . It is the most difficult Zen practice to leave people to their destiny, even though it's painful - just loving them, and breathing with them, and distracting them in a sweet way, and laughing with them . . . if something was not my problem, I probably did not have the solution.Collection: Sweet
You were loved because God loves, period. God loved you, and everyone, not because you believed in certain things, but because you were a mess, and lonely, and His or Her child. God loved you no matter how crazy you felt on the inside, no matter what a fake you were; always, even in your current condition, even before coffee. God loves you crazily, like I love you...like a slightly overweight auntie, who sees only your marvelousness and need.Collection: Lonely
I thought such awful thoughts that I cannot even say them out loud because they would make Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish.Collection: Jesus
Your inside person doesn’t age. Your inside person is soul, is heart, in the eternal now, the ageless, the old, the young, all the ages you’ve ever been.Collection: Heart
I can tell you that what you're looking for is already inside you.Collection: I Can
Some people have a thick skin and you don’t. Your heart is really open and that is going to cause pain, but that is an appropriate response to this world. The cost is high, but the blessing of being compassionate is beyond your wildest dreams.Collection: Dream
Never compare your insides to everyone else's outsides.Collection: Compare
You are going to feel like hell if you never write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves in your heart--your stories, visions, memories, songs: your truth, your version of things, in your voice. That is really all you have to offer us, and it's why you were born.Collection: Song
This is the most profound spiritual truth I know: that even when we're most sure that love can't conquer all, it seems to anyway. It goes down into the rat hole with us, in the guise of our friends, and there it swells and comforts. It gives us second winds, third winds, hundredth winds.Collection: Spiritual
Forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a better past.Collection: Relationship
Rule 1: When all else fails, follow instructions. And Rule 2: Don't be an asshole.Collection: Failing
Sometimes I think that Jesus watches my neurotic struggles, and shakes his head and grips his forehead and starts tossing back mojitos.Collection: Jesus
You can get the monkey off your back, but the circus never leaves townCollection: Recovery
Laughter is carbonated holiness.Collection: Laughter
Expectations are resentments under construction.Collection: Parenting
Clutter and mess show us that life is being lived.Collection: Life Is
But grace can be the experience of a second wind, when even though what you want is clarity and resolution, what you get is stamina and poignancy and the strength to hang on.Collection: Wind
For me, being a writer is not an altered state. It's very ponderous, and very - it's like being a shoemaker.Collection: States
I think that is why we stay close to our families, no matter how neurotic the members, how deeply annoying or dull- because when people have seen you at your worst, you don’t have to put on the mask as much.Collection: Thinking
...after a few days at the desk, telling the truth in an interesting way turns out to be as easy and pleasurable as bathing a cat.Collection: Cat
Astonishing material and revelation appear in our lives all the time. Let it be. Unto us, so much is given. We just have to be open for business.Collection: Revelations
I am drawn to people that are not going to shy away from the very dark, scary stuff of the human condition and in a lot of cases people need alcohol or drugs to create poetry and poetic pose that can take you so far out there where you are still able to recognize yourself and then to bring you back home where you're not the same person you were when you left.Collection: Home
When what we see catches us off guard, and when we write it as realistically and openly as possible, it offers hope. You look around and say, Wow, there's that same mockingbird; there's that woman in the red hat again. The woman in the red hat is about hope because she's in it up to her neck, too, yet every day she puts on that crazy red hat and walks to town.Collection: Crazy
We're out there somewhere between the known and the unknown, trying to reel in both for a closer look.Collection: Inspirational
To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass.Collection: Powerful
Your unconscious can't work when you are breathing down its neck.Collection: Inspirational
I believe in listening to the - what calls you from your heart and your spirit and if you do it badly, like learning to dance, you do it badly or you're going to kick yourself when you grow old and you meant to do it.Collection: Believe
I was usually filled with a sense of something like shame until I'd remember that wonderful line of Blake's- that we are here to learn to endure the beams of love- and I would take a long deep breath and force these words out of my strangulated throat: "Thank you.Collection: Long
It is hard to remember that you are a cherished spiritual being when you're burping up apple fritters and Cheetos.Collection: Spiritual
I used to think that paired opposites were a given, that love was the opposite of hate, right the opposite of wrong. But now I think we sometimes buy into these concepts because it is so much easier to embrace absolutes than to suffer reality. I don't think anything is the opposite of love. Reality is unforgivingly complex.Collection: Hate