Anne Lamott
I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do - the actual act of writing - turns out to be the best part. It's like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.Collection: Writing
Most humbling of all is to comprehend the lifesaving gift that your pit crew of people has been for you, and all the experiences you have shared, the journeys together, the collaborations, births and deaths, divorces, rehab, and vacations, the solidarity you have shown one another. Every so often you realize that without all of them, your life would be barren and pathetic. It would be Death of a Salesman, though with e-mail and texting.Collection: Divorce
People help you or you help them and when we offer or receive help, we take in each other. And then we are saved.Collection: People
A nun I know once told me she kept begging God to take her character defects away from her. After years of this prayer, God finally got back to her: I'm not going to take anything away from you, you have to give it to Me.Collection: Prayer
There is ecstasy in paying attention.Collection: Attention
only grieving can heal grief; the passage of time will lessen the acuteness, but time alone, without the direct experience of grief, will not heal it.Collection: Grief
Sometimes it feels like God has reached down and touched me, blessed me a thousand times over, and sometimes it all feels like a mean joke, like God's advisers are Muammar Qaddafi and Phyllis Schlafly.Collection: Life
I could become like that dyslexic agnostic in the old joke - the one who lies in bed and tries to figure out if his dog exists.Collection: God
This is the Easter message, that awakening is possible, to the goodness of God, the sacredness of human life, the sisterhood and brotherhood of all.Collection: Easter
It is a violation of trust to use your kids as caulking for the cracks in you.Collection: Kids
The mix in our rooms is so touching: the clutter and the cracks in the wall belie a bleakness or brokenness in our lives; while photos and a few rare objects show our pride, our rare shining moments ... these rooms are future ruinsCollection: Wall
Quiet, deep breath after any prayer is another form of Amen.Collection: Prayer
I never had a particularly strong craving to procreate, except for earlier fantasies of wanting to be Marmee in Little Women.Collection: Strong
All these people keep waxing sentimental about how fabulously well I am doing as a mother, how competent I am, but I feel inside like when you're first learning to put nail polish on your right hand with your left. You can do it, but it doesn't look all that great around the cuticles.Collection: Mother
Get to know your characters as well as you can let there be something at stake, and then let the chips fall where they may.Collection: Fall
That thing you had to force yourself to do-the actual act of writing-turns out to be the best part.Collection: Writing
Jealousy has always been my cross, the weakness and woundedness in me that has most often caused me to feel ugly and unlovable, like the Bad Seed.Collection: Jealousy
When I was young, I used to be so jealous of other girls that it crippled me.Collection: Girl
Grace is having a commitment to- or at least an acceptance of- being ineffective and foolish. That our bottled charm is the main roadblock to drinking that clear cool glass of love.Collection: Drinking
It's funny where we look for salvation, and where we actually find it.Collection: Looks
You know, we're often ashamed of asking for so much help because it seems selfish or petty or narcissistic, but I think, if there's a God -- and I believe there is -- that God is there to help. That's what God's job is.Collection: Jobs
The writer is a person who is standing apart, like the cheese in 'The Farmer in the Dell' standing there alone but deciding to take a few notes. You’re outside, but you can see things up close through your binoculars. Your job is to present clearly your viewpoint, your line of vision. Your job is to see people as they really are, and to do this, you have to know who you are in the most compassionate possible sense. Then you can recognize others.Collection: Jobs
But easy's like, who cares? Easy's like, how much is easy going to get you?Collection: Who Cares
I very rarely read the responses to my Salon pieces, because (as you may have noticed) the trolls can be SO evil. So violent in their hostility to me and my work. OK, wait, wait, wait. That's a lie. I do read the responses--and get mesmerized, like cobra hypnosis. But I laugh (mostly) at the trolls, and think about what tiny little weenies they must have. (They seem to be mostly men.) And then ALL these smart, funny people leap to my defense, which is medicine, and fills me with love and thankfulness.Collection: Smart
We all have the dark, ignorant shadow inside us. I have worked endlessly to reveal it and heal it in me, but of course there's some primitive weird stuff in me. The Tea Party is about exhorting white supremacy, though, so I've had a tiny bit of trouble experiencing sympathy.Collection: Party
When we did art with the kids, the demons would lie down.Collection: Art
What people somehow forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here.Collection: Children
We all often feel like we are pulling teeth, even those writers whose prose ends up being the most natural and fluid. The right words and sentences just do not come pouring out like ticker tape most of the time.Collection: Teeth
Anything you say from your heart to God is a prayer.Collection: Prayer
Without using the word, everyone started forgiving each other again. Just like that, from the no of all nothingness: you have a big tense mess and out of it comes some joy. It must be magic.Collection: Joy
Good therapy helps. Good friends help. Pretending that we are doing better than we are doesn't. Shame doesn't. Being heard does.Collection: Good Friend
I'd wanted to be a writer my whole life. But when I finally made it, I felt like a greyhound catching the mechanical rabbit she'd been chasing for so long--discovering it was merely metal, wrapped in cloth. It wasn't alive; it had no spirit. It was fake.Collection: Long
We're like Magic 8-Balls. After you ask your question and shake the 8-Ball, you read the answer in the little window. If you ever broke open a Magic 8-Ball with a hammer, you discovered that it contained a many-sided plastic object, with an answer on every facet, floating in a cylinder of murky blue fluid. The many-sided core held the answer to your question. My theory is that, as with our children, as with every surface of that geodesic dome inside the 8-Ball, every age we've ever been is who we are.Collection: Children
Having a child as a single mother was a crucible - maybe this is true for all parents. I got rid of so much stuff that didn't really matter in the scheme of things-like throwing stuff out of an airplane that kept me flying too low. What was left was essential, i.e. not a lot of extraneous stuff that had kept me busy and people-pleasing. I just didn't have the luxury of wasting my life force on so much stupidity and distraction. That made me strong.Collection: Mother
One line of dialogue that rings true reveals character in a way that pages of description can't.Collection: Character
The truth is that progress is usually small and sneaky.Collection: Progress
Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don't worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent.Collection: Writing
I honestly think that in order to be a writer you have to learn to be reverent. If not, why are you writing? Why are you here?Collection: Writing
There is a door we all want to walk through and writing can help you find it and open it.Collection: Writing
There are a lot of us, some published, some not, who think the literary life is the loveliest one possible, this life of reading and writing and corresponding. We think this life is nearly ideal.Collection: Reading
[Her] work taught me that you could be all the traditional feminine things -- a mother, a lover, a listener, a nurturer -- and you could also be critically astute and radical and have a minority opinion that was profoundly moral.Collection: Mother
When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again.Collection: Absurdity Of Life
Part of me loves and respects men so desperately, and part of me thinks they are so embarrassingly incompetent at life and in love. You have to teach them the very basics of emotional literacy. You have to teach them how to be there for you, and part of me feels tender toward them and gentle, and part of me is so afraid of them, afraid of any more violation.Collection: Love You
When he sees little kids sitting in the backseat of cars, in those little car seats that have steering wheels, with grim expressions of concentration on their faces, clearly convinced that their efforts are causing the car to do whatever it is doing, he thinks of himself and his relationship with God: God who drives along silently, gently amused, in the real driver's seat.Collection: God
A priest friend of mine has cautioned me away from the standard God of our childhoods, who loves you and guides you and then, if you are bad, roasts you: God as a high school principal in a gray suit who never remembered your name but is always leafing unhappily through your files.Collection: God
All I know is that after 10 years of being sober, with huge support to express my pain and anger and shadow, the grief and tears didn’t wash me away. They gave me my life back! They cleansed me, baptized me, hydrated the earth at my feet. They brought me home, to me, to the truth of me.Collection: Pain
Very few writers really know what they are doing until they have done it.Collection: Done
The clipping said forgiveness meant that God is for giving, and that we are here for giving too, and that to withold love or blessings is to be completely delusional.Collection: Blessing
Now she and I sit together in her room and eat chocolate, and I tell her that in a very long time when we both to go heaven, we should try to get chairs next to each other, close to the dessert table.Collection: Long