Quotes by Anne Lamott

You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the rational mind.

One secret of life is that the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day. Another secret is that laughter is carbonated holiness.

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.

And because she did not shove this down my throat, this dawned on me.

You are going to have to give and give and give, or theres no reason for you to be writing. You have to give from the deepest part of yourself, and you are going to have to go on giving, and the giving is going to have to be its own reward. There is no cosmic importance to your getting something published, but there is in learning to be a giver.

You can get the monkey off your back, but the circus never leaves town

... the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day. [pp. 65-66]

I was terrified of death by the time I was three or four, actively if not lucidly. I had frequent nightmares about snakes and scary neighbors. By the age of four or five, I was terrified by my thoughts. By the time I was five, the migraines began. I was so sensitive about myself and the world that I cried or shriveled up at the slightest hurt. People always told me, Youve got to get a thicker skin, like now they might say, jovially, Let go and let God. Believe me, if I could, I would, and in the meantime I feel like stabbing you in the forehead. Teachers wrote on my report cards that I was too sensitive, excessively worried, as if this were an easily correctable condition, as if I were wearing too much of the violet toilet water little girls wore then.

...I learned that God was an equal opportunity employer—that it was possible to experience the divine anywhere you were, anywhere you could see the sun and moon rise or set, or burn through the fog.

Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue

She felt as if the mosaic she had been assembling out of lifes little shards got dumped to the ground, and there was no way to put it back together.

Holiness has most often been revealed to me in the exquisite pun of the first syllable, in holes- in not enough help, in brokenness, mess. High holy places, with ethereal sounds and stained glass, can massage my illusion of holiness, but in holes and lostness I can pick up the light of small ordinary progress, newly made moments flecked like pepper into the slog and the disruptions.

I kept my expectations low, which is one of the secrets of life.

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.

Rule 1: When all else fails, follow instructions. And Rule 2: Dont be an asshole.

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 get shushed, in the friendliest way. There was sanctuary in a library, there is sanctuary now, from the war, from the storms of our family and our own anxious minds. Libraries are like the mountain, or the meadows behind the goat lady’s house: sacred s

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 dont give up.

All wise people say the same thing that you are deserving of love and that its all here now everything you need. When you pray you are not starting the conversation from scratch just remembering to plug back into a conversation thats always in progress.

My gratitude for good writing is unbounded Im grateful for it the way Im grateful for the ocean.

Think of a fine painter attempting to capture an inner vision beginning with one corner of the canvas painting what he thinks should be there not quite pulling it off covering it over with white paint and trying again each time finding out what his painting isnt until he finally finds out what it is. And when you finally do find out what one corner of your vision is youre off and running.