Anne Lamott

I wish I had thrown out the bathroom scale at age 16. Weighing yourself every morning is like waking up and asking Dick Cheney to validate your sense of inner worth.

My mother was a not-too-devoted atheist. She went to Episcopal church on Christmas Eve every year, and that was mostly it.

I love readings and my readers, but the din of voices of the audience gives me stage fright, and the din of voices inside whisper that I am a fraud, and that the jig is up. Surely someone will rise up from the audience and say out loud that not only am I not funny and helpful, but I'm annoying, and a phony.

You want to give me chocolate and flowers? That would be great. I love them both. I just don't want them out of guilt, and I don't want them if you're not going to give them to all the people who helped mother our children.

No one can appropriate God, goodness, the Bible or Jesus. It just seems that way.

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

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.

My mother might find a thin gold chain at the back of a drawer, wadded into an impossibly tight knot, and give it to me to untangle. It would have a shiny, sweaty smell, and excite me: Gold chains linked you to the great fairy tales and myths, to Arabia, and India; to the great weight of the world, but lighter than a feather.

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor.

Everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, and scared.

I got a lot of things that society had promised would make me whole and fulfilled - all the things that the culture tells you from preschool on will quiet the throbbing anxiety inside you - stature, the respect of colleagues, maybe even a kind of low-grade fame.

I'm drawn to almost any piece of writing with the words 'divine love' and 'impeachment' in the first sentence. But I know the word 'divine' makes many progressive people run screaming for their cute little lives, and so one hesitates to use it.

It's a great time to be alive.

Expectations are resentments under construction.

I was raised with no religious training or influence. Except the influence was to be a moral and ethical person at the secular level. And to be a peace marcher, an activist for civil rights, peace and justice.

I am an Aries. Although I do not believe in astrology, I think this is exactly the right sign to have been born under.

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.

I think Jesus is divine love manifest on Earth, as it comes through the community of Christians.

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

I write because writing is the gift God has given me to help people in the world.

Summer nearly does me in every year. It's too hot and the light is unforgiving and the days go on way too long.

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.

My coming to faith did not start with a leap but rather a series of staggers from what seemed like one safe place to another. Like lily pads, round and green, these places summoned and then held me up while I grew. Each prepared me for the next leaf on which I would land, and in this way I moved across the swamp of doubt and fear.

Nothing can be delicious when you are holding your breath.

I used to love to untangle chains when I was a child. I had thin, busy fingers, and I never gave up. Perhaps there was a psychiatric component to my concentration but like much of my psychic damage, this worked to everyone's advantage.

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.

Being on a book tour is like being on the seesaw when you're a little kid. The excitement is in having someone to play with, and in rising up in the air, but then you're at the mercy of those holding you down, and if it's your older brother, or Paul Wolfowitz, they leap up, so that you crash down and get hurt.

No one tells you that your life is effectively over when you have a child: that you're never going to draw another complacent breath again... or that whatever level of hypochondria and rage you'd learned to repress and live with is going to seem like the good old days.

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

Nothing heals us like letting people know our scariest parts: When people listen to you cry and lament, and look at you with love, it's like they are holding the baby of you.

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

I loved every second of Catholic church. I loved the sickly sweet rotting-pomegranate smells of the incense. I loved the overwrought altar, the birdbath of holy water, the votive candles; I loved that there was a poor box, the stations of the cross rendered in stained glass on the windows.

My mother's eyes were large and brown, like my son's, but unlike Sam's, they were always frantic, like a hummingbird who can't quite find the flower but keeps jabbing around.

I hate the summer.

I went to Goucher College in Maryland for the best possible reasons - to learn - but then I dropped out at 19 for the best possible reasons - to become a writer.

Raising a child, whether or not it is yours, is like Nautilus of the heart and soul.

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

I quit my last real job, as a writer at a magazine, when I was twenty-one. That was the moment when I lost my place of prestige on the fast track, and slowly, millimeter by millimeter, I started to get found, to discover who I had been born to be, instead of the impossibly small package, all tied up tightly in myself, that I had agreed to be.

I like the desert for short periods of time, from inside a car, with the windows rolled up, and the doors locked. I prefer beach resorts with room service.

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.

I don't have very sophisticated taste in music. I listen to a lot of folk music. I like reggae.

If our lives are made up of a string of a thousand moments, at some of those moments we look a lot more spiritually evolved than at others.

There is nothing as sweet as a comeback, when you are down and out, about to lose, and out of time.

Having a baby is like suddenly getting the worlds worst roommate.

No one is more sentimentalized in America than mothers on Mother's Day, but no one is more often blamed for the culture's bad people and behavior.

This aspect of reality, this weird scary aspect of life, can just wreck everything if you don't figure out at some point that it is what makes life so profound, meaningful, rich, complex, wild.

Forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a better past.

I am the woman I grew to be partly in spite of my mother, and partly because of the extraordinary love of her best friends, and my own best friends' mothers, and from surrogates, many of whom were not women at all but gay men. I have loved them my entire life, even after their passing.

Evangelical Christians and I can sit down and talk one on one about how much we love Jesus, and yet I'm not carried in Christian bookstores.

I went to church with my grandparents sometimes and I loved it.

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

When I was a kid, our family used to watch 'Bonanza.' I really liked having a Sunday night TV ritual.

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

I'm kind of a gossip hound, but watching the media whip the small fires into giant forest fires so that they can cover the result is infuriating.

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.

We must not inflict life on children who will be resented; we must not inflict unwanted children on society.

Seeing yourself in print is such an amazing concept: you can get so much attention without having to actually show up somewhere... You don't have to dress up, for instance, and you can't hear them boo you right away.

I am not writing to try and convert people to fundamental Christianity. I am just trying to share my experience, strength and hope, that someone who is as messed up and neurotic and scarred and scared can be fully accepted by our dear Lord, no questions asked.

I would seriously rather be in a long line at the DMV than eat with people I don't know.

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

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

We're often ashamed of asking for so much help because it seems selfish or petty or narcissistic, but I think, if there's a God - and I believe there is - that God is there to help. That's what God's job is.

These days cry out, as never before, for us to pay attention, so we can move through them and get our joy and pride back.

Sometimes I think God loves the ones who most desperately ache and are most desperately lost - his or her wildest, most messed-up children - the way you'd ache and love a screwed-up rebel daughter in juvenile hall.

Clutter and mess show us that life is being lived.

I've heard that our greatest cross to carry is ourselves - how gravely we fall short.

Whenever the world throws rose petals at you, which thrill and seduce the ego, beware. The cosmic banana peel is suddenly going to appear underfoot to make sure you don’t take it all too seriously, that you don’t fill up on junk food.

I've heard people say that God is the gift of desperation, and there's a lot to be said for having really reached a bottom where you've run out of any more good ideas or plans for everybody else's behavior; or how to save and fix and rescue; or just get out of a huge mess, possibly of your own creation.

Teenagers who do not go to church are adored by God but they dont get to meet some of the people who love God back.

I accidentally forgot to graduate from college.

Most marriages are a mess, and the children get caught between two bitter, antagonistic parents. My parents stayed married for 27 unhappy years, till their kids were grown, and this was a catastrophe for us.

Alice Adams wrote a sweet note to me after my first novel came out when I was 26, and I was so blown away that I sent her a bunch of stamps by return mail. I have no idea what I was thinking. It was a star-struck impulse.

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.

I just try to love and serve everyone, and bring everyone water, and lend an ear; that's what Jesus said to do.

The opposite of faith is not doubt: It is certainty. It is madness. You can tell you have created God in your own image when it turns out that he or she hates all the same people you do.

I don't want something special. I want something beautifully plain.

Pay attention to the beauty surrounding you.

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

I used to tell my writing students that they must write the books they wished they could come upon - because then the books they hungered and thirsted for would exist.

The worst part about celebrating another birthday is the shock that you're only as well as you are.

I see that children fill the existential hollowness many people feel; that when we have children, we know they will need us, and maybe love us, but we don't have a clue how hard it is going to be.

I read the same amount of nonfiction and fiction.

I was raised by my parents to believe that you had a moral obligation to try and help save the world.

The Giants are usually described as rag tag, kind of a great garage sale team, and the Democrats are described as the Mommies to the Republican Daddies; and everyone hates the mommies, but wait, wait - I didn't intend to get into the pathos and thrill of being a Democratic Giants fan.

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

The first holy truth in God 101 is that men and women of true faith have always had to accept the mystery of God's identity and love and ways. I hate that, but it's the truth.

I do not at all understand the mystery of grace - only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.

E-books are great for instant gratification - you see a review somewhere of a book that interests you, and you can start reading it five minutes later.

Grief as I read somewhere once is a lazy Susan. One day it is heavy and underwater and the next day it spins and stops at loud and rageful and the next day at wounded keening and the next day numbness silence.

All parents are an embarrassment to their kids. Often, grandparents are the relief. Kids don't have to resist you.

Certainty is missing the point entirely.

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

I do not at all understand the mystery of grace only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.

I was raised in a family where none of us ever raised a voice, so there was no room to express feelings of rage or even unabashed joy - a little bashed joy, here or there, or being mildly disgruntled.

I am going to try to 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.

I like to read away as much of the afternoon as possible, until real life rears its ugly head.

For me, Jesus is my cleft in the rock. He is my safest friend, my safe totally loving accepting big brother.

I've known for years that resentments don't hurt the person we resent, but they do hurt us.

When we're dealing with the people in our family - no matter how annoying or gross they may be, no matter how self-inflicted their suffering may appear, no matter how afflicted they are with ignorance, prejudice or nose hairs - we give from the deepest parts of ourselves.

I spent my whole life helping my mother carry around her psychic trunks like a bitter bellhop. So a great load was lifted when she died, and my life was much easier.