Anne Lamott

“Don't be mean to yourself, though . . .this is the only sin.”

“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.”

“You should not bring more items and hurdles to the obstacle course.”

“You lose the known package of your nice organized self almost instantly here. Overeating is one way back, the way it is at funerals at home.”

“I recognize the divinity in you, but actually more like, I recognize our each-otherness, instantly”

“This family business can be so stressful - difficult, damaged people showing up t spend time with other difficult, damanged people”

“I had to grip myself by the wrist not to pitch one good idea after another at them. . . . I writhed with the effort to stay silent. . . . Since Jax's birth my ideas about what would be best for everyone usually got in the way. Life is already an obstacle course, and when you're adding your own impediments (thinking they're helping), you really crazy it up. You make it harder to even just cross the room. You should not bring more items and hurdles to the obstacle course.”

“She wears latex bicycle shorts nearly every day, and I will tell you why: because she can. I consider it an act of aggression against the rest of us mothers who forgot to start working out after we had kids.”

“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.”

“Toddlers can make you feel as if you have violated some archaic law in their personal Koran and you should die, infidel.”

“Writing can give you what having a baby can give you: it can get you to start paying attention, can help you to soften, can wake you up.”

“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 child's slightly dirty neck.”

“When I feel like shoveling in food, the emptiness can be filled only with love(April 2012, O Magazine)”

“In a library, you can find small miracles and truth, and you might find something that will make you laugh so hard that you will get shushed, in the friendliest way. I have found sanctuary in libraries my whole life, and there is sanctuary there now, from the war, from the storms of our families and our own minds. Libraries are like mountains or meadows or creeks: sacred space. So this afternoon, I'll walk to the library.”

“We aren't a drop in the ocean, but are the ocean, in drops.”

“Now, Muriel Spark is said to have felt that she was taking dictation from God every morning-- sitting there, one supposes, plugged into a Dictaphone, typing away, humming. But this is a very hostile and aggressive position. One might hope for bad things to rain down on a person like this.”

“One writer I know tells me that he sits down every morning and says to himself nicely, "It's not like you don't have a choice, because you do-- you can either type or kill yourself.”

“Never compare your insides to everyone else's outsides.”

“It is a violation of trust to use your kids as caulking for the cracks in you.”

“And what do you do in the face of this powerlessness? As a parent?""You get to be obsessed and angry," Tom said. "And they get to be the age they are, and act like teenagers if they want to. There is a zero-percent chance you will change them. So we breathe in, and out, talk to friends, as needed. We show up, wear clean underwear, say hello to strangers. We plant bulbs, and pick up litter, knowing there will be more in twenty minutes. We pray that we might cooperate with any flicker of light we can find in the world.”

“I was reminded of the Four Immutable Laws of the Spirit: Whoever is present are the right people. Whenever it begins is the right time. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened. And when it's over, it's over.”

“Life with most teenagers was like having a low-grade bladder infection. It hurts, but you had to tough it out.”

“Writing takes a combination of sophistication and innocence; it takes conscience, our belief that something is beautiful because it is right.”

“Life is not a submarine.”

“No matter how people mess with you or let you down, or how you let yourself down, a good book means that when you get in bed that night, you have a good hour. I feel like you pay all day for that hour. That's what books mean to me. I can open this two-dimensional, flat white page with squiggly little black marks on them, and someone has created this world that you're going to enter into ...”

“You have to be a warrior and say, "Maybe it's everyone else's system, but it's not mine." (from her recent interview here, on Goodreads)”

“Oh, but my stomach, she is like a waterbed covered in flannel. When I lie on my side in bed, my stomach lies politely beside me, like a puppy.”

“I've always thought I could use my brain and my heart to jockey everyone around to the good. But life is not jockeyable. When you try, you make people infinitely crazier than they already were, including or especially yourself.”

“Perfectionism means that you try not to leave so much mess to clean up. But clutter and mess show us that life is being lived.”

“One thing I know for sure about raising children is that every single day a kid needs discipline.... But also every single day a kid needs a break.”

“It is unearned love--the love that goes before, that greets us on the way. It's the help you receive when you have no bright ideas left, when you are empty and desperate and have discovered that your best thinking and most charming charm have failed you. Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there.”

“There’s no point in writing hopeless novels. We all know we’re going to die; what’s important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this.”

“Write as if your parents are dead.”

“We begin to find and become ourselves when we notice how we are already found, already truly, entirely, wildly, messily, marvelously who we were born to be.”

“Teenagers who do not go to church are adored by God, but they don't get to meet some of the people who love God back.”

“There's a lovely Hasidic story of a rabbi who always told his people that if they studied the Torah, it would put Scripture on their hearts. One of them asked, "Why on our hearts, and not in them?" The rabbi answered, "Only God can put Scripture inside. But reading sacred text can put it on your heart, and then when your hearts break, the holy words will fall inside.”

“When we did art with the kids, the demons would lie down.”

“Her purse was a weight, ballast; it tethered her to the earth as her mind floated away.”

“Help" is a prayer that is always answered. It doesn't matter how you pray--with your head bowed in silence, or crying out in grief, or dancing. Churches are good for prayer, but so are garages and cars and mountains and showers and dance floors. Years ago I wrote an essay that began, "Some people think that God is in the details, but I have come to believe that God is in the bathroom.”

“For too long, and despite what people told me, I had fallen for what the culture said about beauty, youth, features, heights, weights, hair textures, upper arms.”

“Trying to reason with an addict was like trying to blow out a lightbulb.”

“The speaker at the meeting, a blonde woman in a fine tailored suit, shared how alcoholism had stolen her own childhood, and had now come back for her child.”

“butterflies were wind energy made visible.”

“Rosie [her teenage daughter] had a secret life now, was putting together her own tribe, finding her identity there, and it was great to see, and it hurt like hell.”

“...most of the time, all you have is the moment, and the imperfect love of the people around you.”

“I wish grace and healing were more abracadabra kind of things. Also, that delicate silver bells would ring to announce grace's arrival. But no, it's clog and slog and scootch, on the floor, in the silence, in the dark.”

“Hope is not about proving anything. It's about choosing to believe this one thing, that love is bigger than any grim, bleak shit anyone can throw at us.”

“This is one thing they forget to mention in most child-rearing books, that at times you will just lose your mind. Period. ”

“You want to protect your child from pain, and what you get instead is life, and grace; and though theologians insist that grace is freely given, the truth is that sometimes you pay for it through the nose. And you can't pay your child's way. ”

“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. ”