Anne Lamott

"There are places in the heart you don’t even know exist until you love a child."

- Anne Lamott

"There are really places in your heart that you don’t know exist until you love a child."

- Anne Lamott

"A good marriage is where both people feel like they’re getting the better end of the deal."

- Anne Lamott

"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."

- Anne Lamott

"I am going to notice the lights of the earth, the sun and the moon and the stars, the lights of our candles as we march, the lights with which spring teases us, the light that is already present."

- Anne Lamott

"You can get the monkey off your back, but the circus never leaves town."

- Anne Lamott

"My true religion is kindness. That is a great moral position — practicing kindness, keeping one’s heart open in the presence of suffering."

- Anne Lamott

"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."

- Anne Lamott

"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."

- Anne Lamott

"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."

- Anne Lamott

"Death? Be as proud as you want: bore me later, because Love is sovereign here. Life never ends. Joy comes in the morning. Glory hallelujah. And let it be so."

- Anne Lamott

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

- Anne Lamott

"I am going to try and pay attention to the spring. I am going to look around at all the flowers, and look up at the hectic trees. I am going to close my eyes, and listen."

- Anne Lamott

"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."

- Anne Lamott

"Your problem is how you are going to spend this one odd 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 people and circumstances, or whether you are going to taste it, enjoy it and find out the truth about who you are."

- Anne Lamott

"You have to make mistakes to find out who you aren’t. You take the action, and the insight follows: You don’t think your way into becoming yourself."

- Anne Lamott

"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."

- Anne Lamott

""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.""

- Anne Lamott

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

- Anne Lamott

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

- Anne Lamott

"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."

- Anne Lamott

"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. It's like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship."

- Anne Lamott

"Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere."

- Anne Lamott

"I thought such awful thoughts that I cannot even say them out loud because they would make Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish."

- Anne Lamott

"You will lose someone you can't live without, and your heart will be badly broken."

- Anne Lamott

""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.""

- Anne Lamott

"Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people."

- Anne Lamott

"Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it."

- Anne Lamott

"Clutter and mess show us that life is being lived…Tidiness makes me think of held breath, of suspended animation… Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist’s true friend. What people somehow forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here."

- Anne Lamott

"You will lose someone you can't live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn't seal back up. And you come through. It's like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly - that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp."

- Anne Lamott

"You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp."

- Anne Lamott

"You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly – that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp."

- Anne Lamott

"You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly — that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp."

- Anne Lamott

"It’s good to do uncomfortable things. It’s weight training for life."

- Anne Lamott

""It’s good to do uncomfortable things. It’s weight training for life.""

- Anne Lamott

"No is a complete sentence."

- Anne Lamott

"You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up."

- Anne Lamott

"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. It’s like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship."

- Anne Lamott

"And I felt like my heart had been so thoroughly and irreparably broken that there could be no real joy again, that at best there might eventually be a little contentment. Everyone wanted me to get help and rejoin life, pick up the pieces and move on, and I tried to, I wanted to, but I just had to lie in the mud with my arms wrapped around myself, eyes closed, grieving, until I didn’t have to anymore."

- Anne Lamott

"you can't live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn't seal back up. And you come through. It's like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly - that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp."

- Anne Lamott

"Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: They feed the soul."

- Anne Lamott

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

- Anne Lamott

"It’s funny: I always imagined when I was a kid that adults had some kind of inner toolbox full of shiny tools: the saw of discernment, the hammer of wisdom, the sandpaper of patience. But then when I grew up I found that life handed you these rusty bent old tools – friendships, prayer, conscience, honesty – and said ‘do the best you can with these, they will have to do’. And mostly, against all odds, they do."

- Anne Lamott

"Don’t look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance."

- Anne Lamott

"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."

- Anne Lamott

"Try walking around with a child who’s going, ‘Wow, wow! Look at that dirty dog! Look at that burned-down house! Look at that red sky!’ And the child points, and you look, and you see, and you start going, ‘Wow! Look at that huge crazy hedge! Look at that teeny little baby! Look at the scary dark cloud!’ I think this is how we are supposed to be in the world — present and in awe."

- Anne Lamott

"To love yourself as you are is a miracle, and to seek yourself is to have found yourself, for now. And now is all we have, and love is who we are."

- Anne Lamott

"Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you."

- Anne Lamott

"Almost everything will work if you unplug it for a few minutes… including you."

- Anne Lamott

"Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes ... including you."

- Anne Lamott

"Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes – including you."

- Anne Lamott

"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."

- Anne Lamott

"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."

- Anne Lamott

"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."

- Anne Lamott

"I have found that my tiny church, St. Andrew Presbyterian, has given me a shape to work against--a darning egg--for the last thirty years, what with all these holes. We have a choir of eight people who open their mouths, and a huge sound comes out, a mix of joy, pain, faith and conversational exposition. Spirit rises and falls in the voices, the choir's and ours. The singing is full-throated and clear, like the sound your finger makes when you run it around the rim of a crystal glass. It is like African singing where people call from various spots and create one sound. Twenty minutes after the first cave children started kicking around the first improvised balls, people started singing. Half an hour later, they found harmonies. Even with a couple of exceptional singers in the choir, you hear a solid spirit of song, rather than how individuals personally embellish it. The rising and falling is like all of us leaning forward together, then leaning backward on our heels, then coming forward together again. Spirit flows, and the sounds keep stirring that spirit, as the breezes from the high open windows above us keep stirring the air. Sometimes the pianist hits a few false notes, or the soloist warbles, and some of us sing along enthusiastically in the wrong key and the old people's voices dim. But we all keep singing, a mix of magnificence and plainsong that is beautiful, and the hymn plays on."

- Anne Lamott