Quotes by Anne Lamott

We kept on cooking and walking the dog, taking the kids to the park, cleaning the kitchen, and letting Sara and Adam hate what was going on when they needed to. Sometimes we let them resist finding any meaning or solace in anything that had to do with their daughters diagnosis, and this was one of the hardest things to do -- to stop trying to make things come out better than they were. We let them spew when they needed to; we offered the gift of no comfort when there being no comfort was where they had landed. Then we shopped for groceries.

Hope is not logical. It always comes as a surprise, just when you think all hope is lost. Hope is the cousin to grief, and both take time: you can’t short-circuit grief, or emptiness, and you can’t patch it up with your bicycle tire tube kit. You have to take the next right action.

Grief ends up giving you the two best things: softness and illumination.

A sober friend from Texas said once that the three things I cannot change are the past, the truth, and you. I hate this insight so much.

...[T]here should be a real sense of your imagination and your memories walking and woolgathering, tramping the hills, romping all over the place. Trust them. Dont look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.

This is the most profound spiritual truth I know: that even when were most sure that love cant 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.

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.

Why couldnt Jesus command us to obsess over everything, to try to control and manipulate people, to try not to breathe at all, or to pay attention, stomp away to brood when people annoy us, and then eat a big bag of Hersheys Kisses in bed?

It gets darker and darker, and then Jesus is born.” That line came back to me, from out of nowhere, and I decided to practice radical hope, hope in the face of not having a clue.

[Jesus is] saying that we could be aware of, filled with, and saved by the presence of holy beauty, rather than worship golden calves.

We can see Spirit made visible when people are kind to one another, especially when its a really busy person, like you, taking care of a needy, annoying, neurotic person, like you.

You dont always have to chop with the sword of truth. You can point with it too.

You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they shouldve behaved better.

You celebrate what works and you take tender care of what doesn’t, with lotion, polish, and kindness.

Throughout my childhood I believed that what I thought about was different from what other kids thought about. It was not necessarily more profound, but there was a struggle going on inside me to find some sort of creative or spiritual or aesthetic way of seeing the world and organizing it in my head.

What youre looking for is already inside you. Youve heard this before, but the holy thing inside you really is that which causes you to seek it. You cant buy it, lease it, rent it, date it, or apply for it. The best job in the world cant give it to you. Neither can succes, or fame, or financial security - besides which, there aint no such thing.

I do know the sorrow of being ordinary, and that much of our life is spent doing the crazy mental arithmetic of how, at any given moment, we might improve, or at least disguise or present our defects and screw-ups in either more charming or more intimidating ways.

There was going to be a spot for me in this joint, the earth, after all. It was never going to be a great match for someone as bright and strange as me, but books were going to make it survivable.

I naively believe that self-love is 80 percent of the solution, that it helps beyond words to take yourself through the day as you would with your most beloved mental-patient relative, with great humor and lots of small treats.

But you dont always get what you want;,you get what you get