Anne Lamott Quote #1
... the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day. [pp. 65-66]
Anne Lamott Quote #2
...[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. Don't look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.
Anne Lamott Quote #3
...I learned that God was an equal opportunity employer—that it was possible to experience the divine anywhere you were, anywhere you could see the sun and moon rise or set, or burn through the fog.
Anne Lamott Quote #4
...It really IS easier to experience spiritual connection when your life is in the process of coming apart.
Anne Lamott Quote #5
...most of the time, all you have is the moment, and the imperfect love of the people around you.
Anne Lamott Quote #6
...the three things I cannot change are the past, the truth, and you.
Anne Lamott Quote #7
?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.
Anne Lamott Quote #8
[Jesus is] saying that we could be aware of, filled with, and saved by the presence of holy beauty, rather than worship golden calves.
Anne Lamott Quote #9
[S]he believed that the Buddhists were right–that if you want, you will suffer; if you love, you will grieve. (68)
Anne Lamott Quote #10
A good marriage is where both people feel like they're getting the better end of the deal.
Anne Lamott Quote #11
A nun I know once told me she kept begging God to take her character defects away from her. After years of this prayer, God finally got back to her: I'm not going to take anything away from you, you have to give it to Me.
Anne Lamott Quote #12
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.
Anne Lamott Quote #13
A whole lot of us believers, of all different religions, are ready to turn back the tide of madness by walking together, in both the dark and the light - in other words, through life - registering voters as we go, and keeping the faith.
Anne Lamott Quote #14
A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way.
Anne Lamott Quote #15
A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way. It's a lie if you make something up. But you make it up in the name of the truth, and then you give your heart to expressing it clearly.
Anne Lamott Quote #16
Age has given me what I was looking for my entire life - it has given me me . It has provided time and experience and failures and triumphs and time-tested friends who have helped me step into the shape that was waiting for me. I fit into me now. I have an organic life, finally, not necessarily the one people imagined for me, or tried to get me to have. I have the life I longed for. I have become the woman I hardly dared imagine I would be.
Anne Lamott Quote #17
All good writers write [terrible first drafts.] This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts. . . I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said 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.
Anne Lamott Quote #18
All these people keep waxing sentimental about how fabulously well I am doing as a mother, how competent I am, but I feel inside like when you're first learning to put nail polish on your right hand with your left. You can do it, but it doesn't look all that great around the cuticles.
Anne Lamott Quote #19
Almost every single thing you hope publication will do for you is a fantasy, a hologram--it's the eagle on your credit card that only seems to soar.
Anne Lamott Quote #20
And because she did not shove this down my throat, this dawned on me.
Anne Lamott Quote #21
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 Quote #22
And I guess when you take away the resentment and disappointment, it's that simple. It is what we do in families: we help, because we were helped.
Anne Lamott Quote #23
And we've read scary books and watched scary movies and TV shows together. He's met monsters, ghouls, and demons on the page and on the screen. There's nothing like watching Anaconda with your best friend or lying in bed next to your mother reading Roald Dahl, because that way you get to explore dark stuff safely. You get to laugh with it, to step out on the vampire's dance floor and take him for a spin, and then step back into your life. When you make friends with fear, it can't rule you.
Anne Lamott Quote #24
Because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be?
Anne Lamott Quote #25
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.
Anne Lamott Quote #26
Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.
Anne Lamott Quote #27
But how? my students ask. How do you actually do it?
You sit down, I say. You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your unconscious to kick in for you creatively. So you sit down at, say, nine every morning, or ten every night. You put a piece of paper in the typewriter, or you turn on the computer and bring up the right file, and then you stare at it for an hour or so. You begin rocking, just a little at first, and then like a huge autistic child. You look at the ceiling, and over at the clock, yawn, and stare at the paper again. Then, with your fingers poised on the keyboard, you squint at an image that is forming in your mind -- a scene, a locale, a character, whatever -- and you try to quiet your mind so you can hear what that landscape or character has to say above the other voices in your mind.Anne Lamott Quote #28
But you are not your bank account, or your ambition. You're not the cold clay lump you leave behind when you die. You're not your collection of walking personality disorders. You are Spirit, you are love, and even though it is hard to believe sometimes, you are free. You're here to love, and be loved, freely. If you find out next week that you are terminally ill - and we're all terminally ill on this bus - what will matter are memories of beauty, that people loved you, and that you loved them.
Anne Lamott Quote #29
But you don't always get what you want;,you get what you get
Anne Lamott Quote #30
Certainty is missing the point entirely.
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