Anne Lamott Quotes: 37

• 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 reason I never give up hope is because everything is so basically hopeless.

• 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.

• Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.

• Most of me was glad when my mother died. She was a handful, but not in a cute, festive way. More in a life-threatening way, that had caused me a long time ago to give up all hope of ever feeling good about having had her as a mother.

• We can't understand when we're pregnant, or when our siblings are expecting, how profound it is to have a shared history with a younger generation: blood, genes, humor. It means we were actually here, on Earth, for a time - like the Egyptians with their pyramids, only with children.

• For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.

  Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

• Your experiences will be yours alone. But truth and best friendship will rarely if ever disappoint you.

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

• Everyone is flailing through this life without an owner's manual, with whatever modicum of grace and good humor we can manage.

• Your problem is how you are going to spend this one and precious life you have been issued. Whether you're going to spend it trying to look good and creating the illusion that you have power over circumstances, or whether you are going to taste it, enjoy it and find out the truth about who you are.

• 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.

  Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year

• 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.

  Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

• It's good to do uncomfortable things. It's weight training for life.

  Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

• Laughter is carbonated holiness.

• I think joy and sweetness and affection are a spiritual path. We're here to know God, to love and serve God, and to be blown away by the beauty and miracle of nature. You just have to get rid of so much baggage to be light enough to dance, to sing, to play. You don't have time to carry grudges; you don't have time to cling to the need to be right.

• 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.

  Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

• When hope is not pinned wriggling onto a shiny image or expectation, it sometimes floats forth and opens.

• 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 don't give up.

  Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

• It turned out this man worked for the Dalai Lama. And she said gently-that they believe when a lot of things start going wrong all at once, it is to protect something big and lovely that is trying to get itself born-and that this something needs for you to be distracted so that it can be born as perfectly as possible.

  Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith

• 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.

  Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

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

  Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

• The road to enlightenment is long and difficult, and you should try not to forget snacks and magazines.

  Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith

• Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don't drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor's yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper.

  Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

• Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you're 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 we're taught not to do. We're 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.

  Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

• 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.

  Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

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

  Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith

• I didn't need to understand the hypostatic unity of the Trinity; I just needed to turn my life over to whoever came up with redwood trees.

  Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

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

  Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

• I have a very dark sense of humor. I swear. I have a very playful relationship with Jesus.

• 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.

  Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

• 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.

  Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith

• Then the singing enveloped me. It was furry and resonant, coming from everyone's very heart. There was no sense of performance or judgment, only that the music was breath and food.

  Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith

• If your wife locks you out of the house, you don't have a problem with your door.

  Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

• 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.

• Mattie sat at the table, obsessing, orbiting around herself. She was sick of her worried, hostile mind. It would have killed her long before, she felt, if it hadn't needed the transportation.

  Blue Shoe