I love Anne Lamott. She helps me to remember
laughter and joy and humility and
compassion and love.
❤ Molly
It's good to do uncomfortable things. It's weight training for life.
Joy is the best makeup.
Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.
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.
I do not understand the mystery of grace -- only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us.
Forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a better past.
Not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die.
You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.
A good marriage is where both people feel like they're getting the better end of the deal.
I don't remember who said this, but there really are places in the heart you don't even know exist until you love a child.
Laughter is carbonated holiness.
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.
"No" is a complete sentence.
Expectations are resentments under construction.
My mind is a neighborhood I try not to go into alone.
I am all the ages I've ever been.
Because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be?
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 don't give up.
The road to enlightenment is long and difficult, and you should try not to forget snacks and magazines.
You don't always have to chop with the sword of truth. You can point with it too.
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.
If you have a body, you are entitled to the full range of feelings. It comes with the package.
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.
Perfection is shallow, unreal, and fatally uninteresting.
Sometimes grace works like water wings when you feel you are sinking.
The depth of the feeling continued to surprise and threaten me, but each time it hit again and I bore it...I would discover that it hadn't washed me away.
Certainty is missing the point entirely.
My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I’m grateful for it the way I’m grateful for the ocean.
Don't look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.
I liked those ladies! They were helpers, and they danced.' These are the words I want on my gravestone: that I was a helper, and that I danced.
...the three things I cannot change are the past, the truth, and you.
Sometimes this human stuff is slimy and pathetic...but better to feel it and talk about it and walk through it than to spend a lifetime being silently poisoned.
You can tell if people are following Jesus, because they are feeding the poor, sharing their wealth, and trying to get everyone medical insurance.
Never compare your insides to everyone else's outsides.
I'm here to be me, which is taking a great deal longer than I had hoped.
It was not facing what life dealt that made you crazy, but rather trying to set life straight where it was unstraightenable.
Here are the two best prayers I know: 'Help me, help me, help me' and 'Thank you, thank you, thank you.
But grace can be the experience of a second wind, when even though what you want is clarity and resolution, what you get is stamina and poignancy and the strength to hang on.
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.
Being enough was going to have to be an inside job.
Peace is joy at rest. Joy is peace on its feet.
Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul.
Rest and laughter are the most spiritual and subversive acts of all. Laugh, rest, slow down.
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.
Sometimes grace is a ribbon of mountain air that gets in through the cracks.
I think we're all pretty crazy on this bus. I'm not sure I know anyone who's got all the dots on his or her dice.
If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. Otherwise, you'll just be rearranging furniture in rooms you've already been in.
It is hard to remember that you are a cherished spiritual being when you're burping up apple fritters and Cheetos.
Write as if your parents are dead.
It is a violation of trust to use your kids as caulking for the cracks in you.
Gratitude, not understanding, is the secret to joy and equanimity.
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.
There is ecstasy in paying attention.
— Anne Lamott
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| With Annie at Powell's Books, Portland, OR |
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