It’s a great time to be alive. — Anne Lamott

Most of the time, all you have is the moment, and the imperfect love of the people around you. — Anne Lamott

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

Maybe all we can do is make our remaining time here full of gentleness and good humor. — Anne Lamott

Living on Earth has always been a dangerous way to spend your time. — Anne Lamott

I don’t think you have time to waste not writing because you are afraid you won’t be good at it. — Anne Lamott

I spend most of my time alone, because I so value and thrive in the quiet. Heaven. — Anne Lamott

Rituals are a good signal to your unconscious that it is time to kick in. — Anne Lamott

Every time I see the bumper sticker that says ‘We think we’re humans having spiritual experiences, but we’re really spirits having human experiences,’ I (a) think it’s true and (b) want to ram the car. — Anne Lamott

Only grieving can heal grief; the passage of time will lessen the acuteness, but time alone, without the direct experience of grief, will not heal it. — Anne Lamott

My father really taught me that you really develop the habit of writing and you sit down at the same time every day, you don’t wait for inspiration. — Anne Lamott

Now she and I sit together in her room and eat chocolate, and I tell her that in a very long time when we both to go heaven, we should try to get chairs next to each other, close to the dessert table. — Anne Lamott

What if we never ‘get over’ certain deaths, or our childhoods? What if the idea that we should have by now, or will, is a great palace lie? What if we’re not supposed to? What if it takes a life time…? — Anne Lamott

And that almost everyone was struggling to wake up, to be loved, and not feel so afraid all the time. That’s what the cars, degrees, booze, and drugs were about. — Anne Lamott

My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I’m grateful for it the way I’m grateful for the ocean. — Anne Lamott

Write regularly, whether you feel like writing or not, and whether you think what you’re writing is any good or not. — Anne Lamott

Publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is. — Anne Lamott

If you are hoping to find your self–worth and fulfillment in other peoples’ opinion of your writing, you will never find it. — Anne Lamott

For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts. — Anne Lamott

Writing takes a combination of sophistication and innocence; it takes conscience, our belief that something is beautiful because it is right. — Anne Lamott

Good writing is about telling the truth. — Anne Lamott

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

Needless to say, there was no one around remotely fitting the description of a normal person: I was at a writing conference. — Anne Lamott

For some of us, good books and beautiful writing are our ultimate solace, even more comforting than exquisite food. — Anne Lamott

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. — Anne Lamott

There are a lot of us, some published, some not, who think the literary life is the loveliest one possible, this life of reading and writing and corresponding. We think this life is nearly ideal. — Anne Lamott

My father was a writer, so I grew up writing and reading and I was really encouraged by him. — Anne Lamott

Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. — Anne Lamott

I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all it is cracked up to be. But writing is. — Anne Lamott

There is a door we all want to walk through and writing can help you find it and open it. — Anne Lamott

I honestly think that in order to be a writer you have to learn to be reverent. If not, why are you writing? Why are you here? — Anne Lamott

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

There are moments when I am writing when I think that if other people knew how I felt right now, they’d burn me at the stake for feeling so good, so full, so much intense pleasure. — Anne Lamott

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. — Anne Lamott

I don’t think anything is the opposite of love. — Anne Lamott

Love is so much bigger than our ignorance. — Anne Lamott

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. — Anne Lamott

Being a parent is absolutely exhausting and draining, along with all the joy and love. — Anne Lamott

I happen to be a Christian, but I know that there is one God. People worshipping goodness and love and kindness and truth are worshipping the same God. — Anne Lamott

Learning to love back is the hardest part of being alive. — Anne Lamott

S]he believed that the Buddhists were right–that if you want, you will suffer; if you love, you will grieve. (68) — Anne Lamott

If you’re lucky you find your way into a spiritual community and you start to find the great teachers of all the ages who said the same thing. There’s only love, you’re made of love. — Anne Lamott

You are going to love some of your characters because they are you or some facet of you, and you are going to hate some of your characters for the same reason. — Anne Lamott

Sam said to me the other day, ‘I love you like 20 tyrannosauruses on 20 mountaintops,’ and this is the exact same way in which I love him. — 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

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

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

I believe that discipline and self–love are the total secrets to freedom. — Anne Lamott

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. — Anne Lamott

Pets are the world to me. I think they are the most obvious manifestations of divine love that we are going to see this side of eternity. — Anne Lamott

Dogs are the closest we come to knowing the divine love of God on this side of eternity. — Anne Lamott

Once an old woman at my church said the secret is that God loves us exactly the way we are and that he loves us too much to let us stay like this, and I’m just trying to trust that. — Anne Lamott

The clipping said forgiveness meant that God is for giving, and that we are here for giving too, and that to withold love or blessings is to be completely delusional. — 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

Grace means you’re in a different universe from where you had been stuck, when you had absolutely no way to get there on your own. — Anne Lamott

Grace arrived, like the big, loopy stitches with which a grandmotherly stranger might baste your hem temporarily. — Anne Lamott

Laughter is the key that grace has arrived. — Anne Lamott

Sometimes grace is a ribbon of mountain air that gets in through the cracks. — Anne Lamott

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. — Anne Lamott

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

Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue — Anne Lamott

My mind is a neighborhood I try not to go into alone. — Anne Lamott

And you try to quiet your mind so you can hear. — Anne Lamott

Since you can’t heal your own sick mind with your own sick mind, I needed to consult somebody else’s sick mind. — Anne Lamott

You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the rational mind. — Anne Lamott

When we agree to being part of something bigger than our own wired, fixated minds, we are saved. — Anne Lamott

Her purse was a weight, ballast; it tethered her to the earth as her mind floated away. — Anne Lamott

Here are the two best prayers I know: ‘Help me, help me, help me’ and ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you. — Anne Lamott

Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers. — Anne Lamott

The American way is to not need help, but to help. — Anne Lamott

People help you or you help them and when we offer or receive help, we take in each other. And then we are saved. — Anne Lamott

Good therapy helps. Good friends help. Pretending that we are doing better than we are doesn’t. Shame doesn’t. Being heard does. — Anne Lamott

I do not know much about God and prayer, but I have come to believe over the last twenty–five years, that there’s something to be said about keeping prayer simple. Help, Thanks, Wow. — Anne Lamott

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

So Rita and I decided that the most subversive, revolutionary thing I could do was to show up for my life and not be ashamed. — Anne Lamott

You must not inflict life on someone who will be resented. — Anne Lamott

Mostly what happens in the novels never happened in real life. — Anne Lamott

Everyone has come to understand that unconditional love is a reality, but with as shelf life of about eight to ten seconds. [p. 110] — Anne Lamott

What fills us is real, sweet, dopey, funny life. — Anne Lamott

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

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. — Anne Lamott

Clutter and mess show us that life is being lived. — Anne Lamott

It’s good to do uncomfortable things. It’s weight training for life. — Anne Lamott

Life is really pretty tricky, and there’s a lot of loss, and the longer you stay alive, the more people you lose whom you actually couldn’t live without. — Anne Lamott

This is the Easter message, that awakening is possible, to the goodness of God, the sacredness of human life, the sisterhood and brotherhood of all. — Anne Lamott

Radical self–care is what we’ve been longing for, desperate for, our entire lives–friendship with our own hearts. — Anne Lamott

Perfectionism means that you try not to leave so much mess to clean up. But clutter and mess show us that life is being lived. — Anne Lamott

It was not facing what life dealt that made you crazy, but rather trying to set life straight where it was unstraightenable. — Anne Lamott

I have been somebody who has not written a great deal about the truth of my family’s life. — Anne Lamott

When we search for something larger than our own selves to hook into, we can come through whatever life throws at us. — Anne Lamott

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. — Anne Lamott

Life with most teenagers was like having a low–grade bladder infection. It hurts, but you had to tough it out. — Anne Lamott

The grief and tears didn’t wash me away. They gave me my life back! They cleansed me, baptized me, hydrated the earth at my feet. — Anne Lamott

Presents can make up for some of the disappointments that life doles out, such as it makes almost no sense and is coming to an end more quickly than ever. — Anne Lamott

The truth is that progress is usually small and sneaky. — Anne Lamott

The truth of my experience is that we are all a lot more alike than we are different. — Anne Lamott

Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act–truth is always subversive. — Anne Lamott

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

A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way. — Anne Lamott

You don’t always have to chop with the sword of truth. You can point with it too. — Anne Lamott