Quotes By Anne Lamott

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

Some people won't go the extra mile, and then on their birthday, when no one makes a fuss, they feel neglected and bitter.

I hate the summer.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If you don't die of thirst, there are blessings in the desert. You can be pulled into limitlessness, which we all yearn for, or you can do the beauty of minutiae, the scrimshaw of tiny and precise. The sky is your ocean, and the crystal silence will uplift you like great gospel music, or Neil Young.

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.

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.

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

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 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 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.

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

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

I was the angriest daughter on earth, and also, one of the most devoted.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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

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 whistle is always waiting to be blown, and in some ways, it gets me to do better work.

I woke up full of hate and fear the day before the most recent peace march in San Francisco. This was disappointing: I'd hoped to wake up feeling somewhere between Virginia Woolf and Wavy Gravy.

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.

Pay attention to the beauty surrounding you.

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.