Quotes by Anne Lamott

When God is going to do something wonderful, He or She always starts with a hardship; when God is going to do something amazing, He or She starts with an impossibility.

Mine was a patchwork God, sewn together from bits of rag and ribbon, Eastern and Western, pagan and Hebrew, everything but the kitchen sink and Jesus.

Teenagers who do not go to church are adored by God, but they dont get to meet some of the people who love God back.

‎You can safely assume youve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.

Every Sunday I nudge Sam in her direction, and he walks to where she is sitting and hugs her. She smells him behind the ears, where he most smells like sweet unwashed new potatoes. This is in fact what I think God may smell like, a young childs slightly dirty neck.

Bird by bird buddy. Just take it bird by bird.

Tom has been having a difficult patch, and we meet at the church of IKEA as often as possible, because it is equidistant from our houses and always cheers us up. Yesterday I asked, In your depression, and with so many people having such a hard time, where is Advent? He tried to wiggle out of it by saying, You Protestants and your little questions! Then, when pushed, he said: Faith is a decision. Do we believe we are ultimately doomed and fucked and theres no way out? Or that God and goodness make a difference? There is heaven, community, and hope - and hope that there is life beyond the grave. But Tom, at the same time, the grave is very real, dark and cold and lonely. Advent is not for the naive. Because in spite of the dark and cold, we see light - you look up, or you make light, with candles, or with strands of lightbulbs on trees. And you give light. Beauty helps, in art and nature and faces. Friends help. Solidarity helps. If you ask me, when people return phone calls, its about as good as it gets. And who knows beyond that.

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. 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. Its like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You cant stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.

You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander. We build this place with the sand of memories; these castles are our memories and inventiveness made tangible. So part of us believes that when the tide starts coming in, we wont really have lost anything, because actually only a symbol of it was there in the sand. Another part of us thinks well figure out a way to divert the ocean. This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean wont wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be.

Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report written on birds that hed had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books about birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him put his arm around my brothers shoulder, and said, Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.

If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Risk being unliked. 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.

Remember that you own what happened to you. If your childhood was less than ideal, you may have been raised thinking that if you told the truth about what really went on in your family, a long bony white finger would emerge from a cloud and point to you, while a chilling voice thundered, We *told* you not to tell. But that was then. Just put down on paper everything you can remember now about your parents and siblings and relatives and neighbors, and we will deal with libel later on.

Because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be?

Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You dont drop-kick a puppy into the neighbors yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper.

I heard a preacher say recently that hope is a revolutionary patience; let me add that so is being a writer. 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.

Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When youre 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.

The problem is acceptance, which is something were taught not to do. Were taught to improve uncomfortable situations, to change things, alleviate unpleasant feelings. But if you accept the reality that you have been given- that you are not in a productive creative period- you free yourself to begin filling up again.

Two things put me in the spirit to give. One is that I have come to think of everyone with whom I come into contast as a patient in the emergency room. I see a lot of gaping wounds and dazed expressions. Or, as Marianne Moore put it, The worlds an orphans home. And this feels more true than almost anything else I know. But so many of us can be soothed by writing: think of how many times you have opened a book, read one line, and said, Yes! And I want to give people that feeling, too, of connection, communication.

The society to which we belong seems to be dying or is already dead. I dont mean to sound dramatic, but clearly the dark side is rising. Things could not have been more odd and frightening in the Middle Ages. But the tradition of artists will continue no matter what form the society takes. And this is another reason to write: people need us, to mirror for them and for each other without distortion-not to look around and say, Look at yourselves, you idiots!, but to say, This is who we are.

The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little. But we do. We have so much we want to say and figure out.