Anne Lamott Quotes:

The reason 'help' is such a great prayer is that God is the gift of desperation. When you're in despair, you're teachable.

Topics: Prayer, Despair, Helping, Teachable

Love is so much bigger than our ignorance.

Topics: Ignorance, Love Is, Bigger

Your unconscious can't work when you are breathing down its neck.

Topics: Inspirational, Breathing, Necks

This is a very violent place to live, the Earth, and we're a very violent species. Cain is still killing Abel. We see that every day.

Topics: Cain, Earth, Abel

We're out there somewhere between the known and the unknown, trying to reel in both for a closer look.

Topics: Inspirational, Trying, Looks

Honesty is not necessarily interesting. I don't want to hear about your dreams or your acid trips, probably unless you make them really interesting.

Topics: Dream, Honesty, Interesting, Acid Trip

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

source: - "'Every Single Thing I Know, as of Today': Author Anne Lamott Shares Life Wisdom in Viral Facebook Post". www.today.com. April 10, 2015.

Topics: Minutes

It's intrusive for grandparents to think they're in charge. It's manipulative. Also, it's self-destructive, since if the parents have to resist you, you won't get your mitts on the kid as often.

Topics: Kids, Thinking, Self

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

Topics: Dog, Knowing, Sides, Dog Lover

I'm one of those religious people who are afraid of everything. I'm instantly worried about everything that could go wrong.

Topics: Religious, People, Worried

You can either set brick as a laborer or as an artist. You can make the work a chore, or you can have a good time. You can do it the way you used to clear the dinner dishes when you were thirteen, or you can do it as a Japanese person would perform a tea ceremony, with a level of concentration and care in which you can lose yourself, and so in which you can find yourself.

Topics: Artist, Finding Yourself, Tea, Tea Ceremony

I don't have any romantic views of parenting. Every step of the way it's really hard. It's a dangerous world, physically and psychologically.

Topics: Views, World, Way, Dangerous World

Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns.

source: - Anne Lamott (2006). “Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith”, p.257, Penguin

Topics: Faith, Light, Return

No matter what circumstances, it's hard to be a parent and maintain a sense of self and identity in the world.

Topics: Self, Parent, Identity, Sense Of Self

And she is going to dance, dance hungry, dance full, dance each cold astonishing moment, now when she is young and again when she is old.

Topics: Dance, Cold, Moments

Drugs took me to places; they were like portals. It's kind of a cliché, but they were like portals to altered states of consciousness into ways of imagining the world, or seeing a world beyond this world, or seeing a world beyond this world that I might not have gotten to unless I discovered meditation and a very deep, intense spiritual path based on contemplation and meditation.

Topics: Spiritual, Meditation, Drug, Altered States, Altered States Of Consciousness

All those years I fell for the great palace lie that grief should be gotten over as quickly as possible and as privately. But, what I've discovered is that the lifelong fear of grief keeps us in a barren, isolated place, and that 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.

Topics: Lying, Grief, Grieving, Isolated Places

I believe in listening to what calls you from your heart and your spirit and if you do it badly, like learning to dance, you do it badly or you're going to kick yourself when you grow old and you meant to do it.

Topics: Believe, Heart, Listening

It's incredibly touching when someone who seems so hopeless finds a few inches of light to stand in and makes everything work as well as possible. All of us lurch and fall, sit in the dirt, are helped to our feet, keep moving, feel like idiots, lose our balance, gain it, help others get back on their feet, and keep going.

Topics: Moving, Fall, Helping Others

I'm a terrible Christian and meditating is very hard for me, and I do it. I do it badly, like I do a lot of things. I believe in doing things badly.

Topics: Christian, Believe, Terrible

A good marriage is where both people feel like they're getting the better end of the deal.

Topics: Love, Marriage, People

I am drawn to people that are not going to shy away from the very dark, scary stuff of the human condition and in a lot of cases people need alcohol or drugs to create poetry and poetic pose that can take you so far out there where you are still able to recognize yourself and then to bring you back home where you're not the same person you were when you left.

Topics: Home, Dark, People, Back Home, Scary Stuff

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

Topics: Kids, Grandparent, Relief

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.

Topics: Christian, Jesus, Down And

Sometimes this human stuff is slimy and pathetic...but better to feel it and talk about it and walk through it than to spend a lifetime being silently poisoned.

Topics: Stuff, Sometimes, Lifetime

Radical self-care is what we've been longing for, desperate for, our entire lives-friendship with our own hearts.

Topics: Heart, Compassion, Self, Self Care

My main problem is that over and over again, I try to get all my characters to say stuff that I think is so witty or erudite you know, so that everybody will go.

Topics: Witty, Character, Thinking

Clutter and mess show us that life is being lived...Tidiness makes me think of held breath, of suspended animation... Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist's true friend. What people somehow forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here.

Topics: Children, True Friend, Mean, Perfectionism, Why We Are Here

My family tends to be pretty alcoholic and drug-addicted.

Topics: Drug, My Family, Alcoholics

But grace can be the experience of a second wind, when even though what you want is clarity and resolution, what you get is stamina and poignancy and the strength to hang on.

Topics: Wind, Grace, Want, Poignancy

I think drugs are part of the magical possibilities of youth and I wouldn't be here if I had continued with it.

Topics: Thinking, Drug, Youth

The problem is acceptance, which is something we're taught not to do. We're taught to improve uncomfortable situations, to change things, alleviate unpleasant feelings. But if you accept the reality that you have been given- that you are not in a productive creative period- you free yourself to begin filling up again.

Topics: Acceptance, Reality, Creative, Writer's Block, Alleviate

For me, being a writer is not an altered state. It's very ponderous, and very - it's like being a shoemaker.

Topics: States, Altered States

Maybe it's wishful thinking, this snaggly faith of mine, or maybe it's Miles Davis saying, Don't play what's there, play what's not there.

source: - "SPIN" Magazine, (p. 30), December 1990.

Topics: Thinking, Play, Miles

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

Topics: Father, Reading, Writing

Gorgeous, amazing things come into our lives when we are paying attention: mangoes, grandnieces, Bach, ponds. This happens more often when we have as little expectation as possible. If you say, "Well, that's pretty much what I thought I'd see," you are in trouble. At that point you have to ask yourself why you are even here. [...] Astonishing material and revelation appear in our lives all the time. Let it be. Unto us, so much is given. We just have to be open for business.

Topics: Expectations, Ponds, Attention

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

Topics: Different

Laughter is carbonated holiness.

Topics: Laughter, Humor, Grace

I've always understood that meditation had to be part of - or was part of the natural path and so I've always sort of dabbled in it.

Topics: Meditation, Path, Natural

Mostly what happens in the novels never happened in real life.

Topics: Real, Real Life, Novel

Age has given me the gift of me; it just gave me what I was always longing for, which was to get to be the woman I've already dreamt of being. Which is somebody who can do rest and do hard work and be a really constant companion, a constant, tender-hearted wife to myself.

Topics: Hard Work, Wife, Age

The difference between a writer who toughs it out and one who doesn't is that you push through the parts where you know that you've just written seven pages when all you're looking for is one paragraph.

Topics: Differences, Pages, Seven

There is nothing you can buy, achieve, own, or rent that can fill up that hunger inside for a sense of fulfillment and wonder.

Topics: Dream, Hunger, Wonder

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.

Topics: Father, Inspiration, Writing

... the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day. [pp. 65-66]

Topics: Nuts, Tribes, Reason

My experience as a writer is that you really do write seven and eight pages to find the paragraph you were after all along.

Topics: Writing, Eight, Pages

In fact, there's really only one thing that everything's made of; it's energy.

Topics: Energy, Facts, Made

This business of having been issued a body is deeply confusing... Bodies are so messy and disappointing.

Topics: Confusing, Body, Disappointing

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.

Topics: Spiritual, Teacher, Love You, Spiritual Community

Gratitude, not understanding, is the secret to joy and equanimity.

source: - Anne Lamott (2006). “Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith”, p.295, Penguin

Topics: Gratitude, Joy, Understanding, Equanimity

I'm not going to change the way people think about me, but I can say you know what? I'm not going to carry that in my backpack.

Topics: Thinking, People, Way

It is hard to remember that you are a cherished spiritual being when you're burping up apple fritters and Cheetos.

Topics: Spiritual, Apples, Remember, Burping

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.

Topics: Thinking, Pet, Sides

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.

source: - Anne Lamott (2000). “Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith”, Anchor

Topics: Inspirational, Wisdom, Autism

I have a giant ego and terrible self-esteem, so I need to hit the re-set button fairly regularly - to get into presence, and humility, and being right-sized.

Topics: Self Esteem, Humility, Ego

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

Topics: People, Helping, Offers

I don't write about the intimate details of my cousins and aunts and uncles, and my mother and my father because it's not right to, for me.

Topics: Mother, Cousin, Uncles, Aunts And Uncles

It's funny: I always imagined when I was a kid that adults had some kind of inner toolbox full of shiny tools: the saw of discernment, the hammer of wisdom, the sandpaper of patience. But then when I grew up I found that life handed you these rusty bent old tools - friendships, prayer, conscience, honesty - and said 'do the best you can with these, they will have to do'. And mostly, against all odds, they do.

source: - Anne Lamott (2000). “Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith”, p.92, Anchor

Topics: Prayer, Honesty, Kids, Against All Odds, Toolbox

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

Topics: My Family, Deals

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

Topics: Expectations, Sometimes

If I have a huge audience, I'd like a bigger audience; maybe slightly a slightly more illustrious audience.

Topics: Bigger, Audience

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won't have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they're doing it.

Topics: Running, Fun, Writing, Great Writing, Writing Advice

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.

source: - Anne Lamott (2007). “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life”, p.22, Anchor

Topics: Inspirational, Life, God, Religion Christian, Fundamentalism

I don't remember who said this, but there really are places in the heart you don't even know exist until you love a child.

Topics: Inspiring, Funny Inspirational, Children, Inspirational Parenting, Inspirational Parents

Oh, my God. What if you wake up some day, and you're 65 or 75, and you never got your novel or memoir written; or you didn't go swimming in warm pools or oceans because your thighs were jiggly or you had a nice big comfortable tummy; or you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life, of imagination and radical silliness and staring off into space like when you were a kid? It's going to break your heart. Don't let this happen.

Topics: Nice, Ocean, Heart, Staring Into Space, Break Your Heart

You can either practice being right or practice being kind.

source: - Anne Lamott (2006). “Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith”, p.94, Penguin

Topics: Positivity, Practice, Be Kind

It turned out this man worked for the Dalai Lama. And she said gently-that they believe when a lot of things start going wrong all at once, it is to protect something big and lovely that is trying to get itself born-and that this something needs for you to be distracted so that it can be born as perfectly as possible.

Topics: Believe, Men, Lovely, Dalai, Lama

The road to enlightenment is long and difficult, and you should try not to forget snacks and magazines.

Topics: Snacks, Long, Enlightenment

If you have a body, you are entitled to the full range of feelings. It comes with the package.

Topics: Feelings, Body, Body Image

Love falls to earth, rises from the ground, pools around the afflicted. Love pulls people back to their feet. Bodies and souls are fed. Bones and lives heal. New blades of grass grow from charred soil. The sun rises.

Topics: Falling In Love, Feet, People, Sun Rise, Blades Of Grass

All I ever wanted since I arrived here on Earth were the things that turned out to be within reach. The same things I needed as a baby - to go from cold to warm, lonely to held, the vessel to the giver, empty to full. You can change the world with a hot bath, if you sink into it from a place of knowing that you are worth profound care, even when you're dirty and rattled. Who knew?

Topics: Lonely, Baby, Dirty, Small Victories, Warm

Laughter is a bubbly, effervescent form of holiness

Topics: Laughter, Holiness, Form

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

Topics: Mind, Trying, Neighborhood

Joy is the best makeup.

Topics: Inspirational, Beauty, Makeup

Help" is a prayer that is always answered. It doesn't matter how you pray--with your head bowed in silence, or crying out in grief, or dancing. Churches are good for prayer, but so are garages and cars and mountains and showers and dance floors. Years ago I wrote an essay that began, "Some people think that God is in the details, but I have come to believe that God is in the bathroom.

Topics: Prayer, Grief, Believe, Dance Floor, Garage

Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report written on birds that he'd had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books about birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, "Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.

Topics: Brother, Father, Book, Older Brother, Paper And Pencil

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.

Topics: Book, Writing, Students

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

Topics: Reading, Writing, Soul, Writing And Reading

Getting into a new relationship is like pouring Miracle-Gro on your character defects.

Topics: New Relationship, Character, Miracle

You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.

Topics: Writing, People, Stories

Certainty is missing the point entirely.

Topics: Missing, Certainty

If you are a writer, or want to be a writer, this is how you spend your days--listening, observing, storing things away, making your isolation pay off. You take home all you've taken in, all that you've overheard, and you turn it into gold. (Or at least you try.)

Topics: Taken, Home, Listening

Some people wanted to get rich or famous, but my friends and I wanted to get real. We wanted to get deep. (Also, I suppose, we wanted to get laid.)

Topics: Real, People, Rich

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

Topics: Space, Intuition, Mind, Calves

Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious.

Topics: Becoming, Conscious

You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the rational mind. The rational mind doesn't nourish you. You assume that it gives you the truth, because the rational mind is the golden calf that this culture worships, but this is not true. Rationality squeezes out much that is rich and juicy and fascinating.

Topics: Space, Giving, Intuition

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

Topics: Mind, Weight, Earth, Ballast

I get thirsty people glasses of water, even if that thirsty person is just me.

Topics: Glasses, People, Water

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.

Topics: Inspirational, Teenager, People

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

Topics: Relationship, Giving Up, Past

Small is how blessings, healing, progress and increase occur.

Topics: Healing, Blessing, Progress

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.

Topics: Real, Writing, Caring

You can get the monkey off your back, but the circus never leaves town

Topics: Recovery, Monkeys, Circus

Expectations are resentments under construction.

source: - Anne Lamott (2017). “Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy”, p.29, Penguin

Topics: Parenting, Expectations, Resentment, Under Construction

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.

Topics: Mean, Grace, Different, Different Universes

If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. Otherwise, you'll just be rearranging furniture in rooms you've already been in.

Topics: Courage, Inspirational Life, Doors, Rearranging

Life is like a recycling center, where all the concerns and dramas of humankind get recycled back and forth across the universe. But what you have to offer is your own sensibility, maybe your own sense of humor or insider pathos or meaning. All of us can sing the same song, and there will still be four billion different renditions.

Topics: Song, Drama, Life Is Like, Across The Universe

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. It's like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship

Topics: Reading, Writing, Heart

This is one thing they forget to mention in most child-rearing books, that at times you will just lose your mind. Period.

Topics: Children, Book, Mind, Child Rearing

Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.

Topics: Book, Mean, Community, Writing And Reading

I thought such awful thoughts that I cannot even say them out loud because they would make Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish.

Topics: Jesus, Cat, Alcohol, Gin

A big heart is both a clunky and a delicate thing; it doesn't protect itself and it doesn't hide. It stands out, like a baby's fontanel, where you can see the soul pulse through.

Topics: Inspirational, Baby, Heart, Big Heart, Delicate Things

Because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be?

Topics: Asking, Alive, Becoming

Prayer means that, in some unique way, we believe we're invited into a relationship with someone who hears us when we speak in silence.

source: - Anne Lamott (2012). “Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers”, p.7, Penguin

Topics: Prayer, Believe, Mean

...music is about as physical as it gets: your essential rhythm is your heartbeat; your essential sound, the breath. We're walking temples of noise, and when you add tender hearts to this mix, it somehow lets us meet in places we couldn't get to any other way.

Topics: Heart, Sound, Essentials, Tender Hearts

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

Topics: Self, Hook

Joy is the best makeup. But a little lipstick is a close runner-up.

Topics: Makeup, Joy, Littles, Lipstick, Runner Up

The world is always going to be dangerous, and people get badly banged up, but how can there be more meaning than helping one another stand up in a wind and stay warm?

Topics: Wind, People, World

If we stay where we are, where we're stuck, where we're comfortable and safe, we die there... When nothing new can get in, that's death.

Topics: Safe, Stuck

You get your confidence and intuition back by trusting yourself, by being militantly on your own side. ... Don't look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.

Topics: Inspirational Life, Feet, Intuition, Just Dance

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

Topics: Christian, Jesus, Thinking

You are not your bank account, our your ambitiousness. You're not the cold clay lump with a big belly you leave behind when you die. You're not your collection of walking personality disorders. You are spirit, you are love.

Topics: Personality, Clay, Spirit, Personality Disorders

Dancing almost always turns out to be a good idea.

Topics: Dance, Ideas, Dancing

You know how I always say that laughter is carbonated holiness? Well, Robin was the ultimate proof of that, and bubbles are spirit made visible.

Topics: Laughter, Robins, Holiness

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.

source: - Source: www.pbs.org

Topics: Prayer, Believe, Simple, Twenty Five

Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist's true friend.

Topics: True Friend, Mean, Artist

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.

Topics: Struggle, Car, Drug

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.

Topics: Tree, Unity, Needs, Redwoods

Here are the two best prayers I know: 'Help me, help me, help me' and 'Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Topics: Prayer, Two, Helping, Morning Prayer, Conceded

I think this is how we are supposed to be in the world-present and in awe.

Topics: Thinking, World, Awe, Dark Clouds

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...?

Topics: Lying, Ideas, Childhood, Certain Death

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.

Topics: Moving, Pride, Joy

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

Topics: Real, Real Life, Afternoon

Any plot you impose on your characters will be onomatopoetic: PLOT. I say don't worry about plot. Worry about the characters. Let what they say or do reveal who they are, and be involved in their lives, and keep asking yourself, Now what happens? The development of relationship creates plot.

Topics: Character, Worry, Plot

You don't always have to chop with the sword of truth. You can point with it too.

You have to make mistakes to find out who you aren't. You take the action, and the insight follows: You don't think your way into becoming yourself.

Topics: Badass, Mistake, Women, Becoming Yourself

You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories.

Topics: Stories

Gratitude begins in our hearts and then dovetails into behavior. It almost always makes you willing to be of service, which is where the joy resides. It means that you are willing to stop being such a jerk. When you are aware of all that has been given to you, in your lifetime and the past few days, it is hard not to be humbled, and pleased to give back.

Topics: Gratitude, Heart, Mean

Nothing can be delicious when you are holding your breath.

Topics: Delicious

You are desperate to communicate, to edify or entertain, to preserve moments of grace or joy or transcendence, to make real or imagined events come alive. But you cannot will this to happen. It is a matter of persistence and faith and hard work. So you might as well just go ahead and get started.

Topics: Real, Hard Work, Persistence

You have to keep taking the next necessary stitch, and the next one, and the next. Without stitches, you just have rags. And we are not rags,

Topics: Rags, Stitches, Next

We write to expose the unexposed. If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. The writer's job is to turn the unspeakable into words - not just into any words, but if we can, into rhythm and blues.

Topics: Jobs, Writing, Doors, Rhythm And Blues

Forgiveness means it finally becomes unimportant that you hit back. You're done. It doesn't necessarily mean that you want to have lunch with the person. If you keep hitting back, you stay trapped in the nightmare...

source: - Anne Lamott (2006). “Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith”, p.47, Penguin

Topics: Forgiveness, Mean, Lunch, Hitting Back

She felt as if the mosaic she had been assembling out of life's little shards got dumped to the ground, and there was no way to put it back together.

Topics: Together, Mosaics, Littles, Assembling

I have a lot of faith. But I am also afraid a lot, and have no real certainty about anything. I remembered something Father Tom had told me--that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns.

Topics: Father, Real, Light, Doubt And Certainty

My idea of absolute happiness is to be in bed on a rainy day, with my blankie, my cat, and my dog.

Topics: Dog, Cat, Rainy Day

And as it turns out, if one person is praying for you, buckle up. Things can happen.

Topics: Praying, Turns, Buckles, Praying For You

...because when people have seen you at their worst, you don't have to put on the mask as much.

Topics: People, Mask, Worst

You don't want to spend your time around people who make you hold your breath. You can't fill up when you're holding your breath. And writing is about filling up, filling up when you are empty, letting images and ideas and smells run down like water - just as writing is also about dealing with the emptiness.

Topics: Running, Writing, Ideas, Filling Up

We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason why they write so little.

Topics: Writing, Sheep, Needs, Reading And Writing, Lice

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.

Topics: Prayer, Character, Years

Hope begins in the dark.

Topics: Inspirational, Dark

...the three things I cannot change are the past, the truth, and you.

Topics: Past, Three

Being enough was going to have to be an inside job.

Topics: Jobs, Enough

It is unearned love--the love that goes before, that greets us on the way. It's the help you receive when you have no bright ideas left, when you are empty and desperate and have discovered that your best thinking and most charming charm have failed you. Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there.

Topics: Grateful, Thinking, Light, Isolated Places, Bright Ideas

Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there.

Topics: Grateful, Light, Grace

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

Topics: Crazy, Trying, Made

I wish grace and healing were more abracadabra kind of things. Also, that delicate silver bells would ring to announce grace's arrival. But no, it's clog and slog and scootch, on the floor, in the silence, in the dark.

Topics: Healing, Dark, Silence, Abracadabra, Silver Bells

Trying to reason with an addict was like trying to blow out a lightbulb.

Topics: Blow, Trying, Reason

For too long, and despite what people told me, I had fallen for what the culture said about beauty, youth, features, heights, weights, hair textures, upper arms.

Topics: Hair, Long, People

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.

Topics: Grief, Numbness, Silence

Never compare your insides to everyone else's outsides.

Topics: Compare

I don't know where to start," one [writing student] will wail. Start with your childhood, I tell them. Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can. Flannery O' Connor said that anyone who has survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life. Maybe your childhood was grim and horrible, but grim and horrible is Okay if it is well done. Don't worry about doing it well yet, though. Just get it down.

Topics: Memories, Writing, Worry

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. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do---the actual act of writing---turns out to be the best part. It's like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.

Topics: Writing, People, Giving, Compelled, Caffeine

You were loved because God loves, period. God loved you, and everyone, not because you believed in certain things, but because you were a mess, and lonely, and His or Her child. God loved you no matter how crazy you felt on the inside, no matter what a fake you were; always, even in your current condition, even before coffee. God loves you crazily, like I love you...like a slightly overweight auntie, who sees only your marvelousness and need.

Topics: Lonely, Children, Crazy, I Love You Like, Auntie

Don't look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.

Topics: Inspiring, Feet, Looks

Writing is about hypnotizing yourself into believing in yourself, getting some work done, then unhypnotizing yourself and going over the material coldly.

Topics: Believe, Writing, Done, Work Done

This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won't wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be.

Topics: Ocean, Heart, Thinking

I'm here to be me, which is taking a great deal longer than I had hoped.

Topics: Deals

one thing about having a baby is that each step of the way you simply cannot imagine loving him any more than you already do, because you are bursting with love, loving as much as you are humanly capable of- and then you do, you love him even more.

Topics: Baby, Way, Steps

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor; the enemy of the people. It will keep you insane your whole life.

Topics: Positivity, Voice, People

We begin to find and become ourselves when we notice how we are already found, already truly, entirely, wildly, messily, marvelously who we were born to be.

Topics: Inspirational, Inspiration, Born

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.

Topics: Writing, People, Trying

One of the gifts of being a writer is that it gives you an excuse to do things, to go places and explore. Another is that writing motivates you to look closely at life, at life as it lurches by and tramps around.

Topics: Writing, Giving, Looks, Tramps

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.

Topics: Revolutionary, Ashamed, Shows

Lies cannot nourish or protect you. Only freedom from fear, freedom from lies, can make us beautiful, and keep us safe.

Topics: Beautiful, Fear, Lying

The difference between you and God is that God doesn't think He's you.

source: - Dorothy Miller Richardson (1967). “Pilgrimage”

Topics: Prayer, Thinking, Light

Perfection is shallow, unreal, and fatally uninteresting.

Topics: Perfection, Shallow, Unreal

Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don't drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor's yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper.

Topics: Patience, Mind, Trying

I was reminded of the Four Immutable Laws of the Spirit: Whoever is present are the right people. Whenever it begins is the right time. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened. And when it's over, it's over.

Topics: Law, People, Four

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

Topics: Beautiful, Writing, Innocence

Rule 1: When all else fails, follow instructions. And Rule 2: Don't be an asshole.

Topics: Failing, Instruction, When All Else Fails

My heart was broken and my head was just barely inhabitable

Topics: Heart, Broken, My Heart

The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little. But we do. We have so much we want to say and figure out.

Topics: Writing, Sheep, Needs, Lice, Needs And Wants

E.L. Doctorow said once said that 'Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.' You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard.

Topics: Writing, Night, Two, Headlights

Two things put me in the spirit to give. One is that I have come to think of everyone with whom I come into contast as a patient in the emergency room. I see a lot of gaping wounds and dazed expressions. Or, as Marianne Moore put it, "The world's an orphan's home." And this feels more true than almost anything else I know. But so many of us can be soothed by writing: think of how many times you have opened a book, read one line, and said, "Yes!" And I want to give people that feeling, too, of connection, communication.

Topics: Book, Communication, Home, Dazed, Emergency Room

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

Topics: Disappoint

We all know we're going to die; what's important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this.

Topics: Men, Important, Faces

For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.

Topics: Book, Reading, Writing

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.

Topics: Spring, Flower, Eye, Spring Flowers, Hectic

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.

Topics: Space, Laughing, Parent, Space Between, Moments Of Life

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.

Topics: Writing, Way, Firsts

I think joy and sweetness and affection are a spiritual path. We're here to know God, to love and serve God, and to be blown away by the beauty and miracle of nature. You just have to get rid of so much baggage to be light enough to dance, to sing, to play. You don't have time to carry grudges; you don't have time to cling to the need to be right.

Topics: Spiritual, Thinking, Light, Spiritual Path

Sometimes grace works like water wings when you feel you are sinking.

Topics: Wings, Water, Grace

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

Topics: Giving Up, Hopeless, Reason, Never Give Up On Something, Don't Give Up Hope

As a Christian and a feminist, the most important message I can carry and fight for is the sacredness of each human life, and reproductive rights for all women are a crucial part of that. It is a moral necessity that we not be forced to bring children into the world for whom we cannot be responsible and adoring and present. We must not inflict life on children who will be resented; we must not inflict unwanted children on society.

Topics: Christian, Children, Fighting, Unwanted, Reproductive Rights

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.

Topics: Inspiring, Hope, Giving Up, Hopes Up, Waiting And Hoping

I liked those ladies! They were helpers, and they danced.' These are the words I want on my gravestone: that I was a helper, and that I danced.

Topics: Want, Gravestone, Helpers

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor.

Topics: Inspirational, Motivational, Voice

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.

Topics: Sweet, Smell, Glasses, Stained Glass Windows, Holy Water

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

Topics: Jesus, Water, Trying

It's good to do uncomfortable things. It's weight training for life.

Topics: Cheer, Training, Weight, Weight Training

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.

Topics: Uplifting, Ocean, Blessing, Gospel Music, Minutiae

Radical self-care is quantum, and radiates out into the atmosphere, like a little fresh air.

Topics: Air, Self, Atmosphere, Mona Lisa, Self Care

Forgiveness means it finally becomes unimportant that you hit back.

Topics: Forgiveness, Mean, Unimportant

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.

Topics: Stars, Spring, Moon

Pay attention to the beauty surrounding you.

Topics: Attention, Pay, Pay Attention

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

Topics: Writing, Effort, Needs, Starting To Write, Great Writing

Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises.

Topics: Writing, Giving, Surprise

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

Topics: Design, Special, Want