Quotes from Anne Lamott

The great Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore wrote, "I slept and dreamt that life was joy. / I awoke and saw that life was service. / I acted and behold, service was joy.

Forgiveness means it finally becomes unimportant for you to hit back. You're done. It doesn't necessarily mean you want to vacation together.

We can see Spirit made visible when people are kind to one another, especially when it's a really busy person, like you, taking care of a needy, annoying, neurotic person, like you.

Prayer is talking to something or anything with which we seek union, even if we are bitter or insane or broken. (In fact, these are probably the best possible conditions under which to pray.) Prayer is taking a chance that against all odds and past history, we are loved and chosen, and do not have to get it together before we show up. The opposite may be true: We may not be able to get it together until after we show up in such miserable shape.

When you can step back at moments like these and see what is happening, when you watch people you love under fire or evaporating, you realize that the secret of life is patch patch patch. Thread your needle, make a knot, find one place on the other piece of torn cloth where you can make one stitch that will hold. And do it again. And again. And again.

Being a writer is part of a noble tradition, as is being a musician — the last egalitarian and open associations. No matter what happens in terms of fame and fortune, dedication to writing is a marching-step forward from where you were before, when you didn't care about reaching out to the world, when you weren't hoping to contribute, when you were just standing there doing some job into which you had fallen.

In early sobriety I heard that if you have an idea after ten p.m., it is probably not a good idea—and this was before e-mail.

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.

During Advent, we have to sit in our own anxiety and funkiness long enough to know what a Promised Land would be like, or, to put it another way, what it means to be saved--which, if we are to believe Jesus or Gandhi, specifically means to see everyone on earth as family.

When humans experience something as powerful as a forest or a rainbow, it is not crazy to assign its existence to a Greater Intelligence.

But I have to believe that Jesus prefers honesty to anything else. I was saying, Here's who I am, and that is where most improvement has to begin.

To heal, it seems we have to stand in the middle of the horror, at the foot of the cross, and wait out another's suffering where that person can see us. To be honest, that sucks. It's the worst, even if you are the mother of God.