Anne Lamott quotes - page 10

Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue. (Anne Lamott)
Peace is joy at rest. Joy is peace on its feet.
Anne Lamott
These are the words I want on my gravestone: that I was a helper, and that I danced.
Anne Lamott
To participate requires self-discipline and trust and courage, because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, as my friend Dale puts it, How alive am I willing to be?
Anne Lamott
Some people have a thick skin and you don't. Your heart is really open and that is going to cause pain, but that is an appropriate response to this world.
Anne Lamott
Courage is fear that has said its prayers.
Anne Lamott
One secret of life is that the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day. Another secret is that laughter is carbonated holiness.
Anne Lamott
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.
Anne Lamott
Every woman's path is difficult, and many mothers were as equipped to raise children as wire monkey mothers. I say that without judgment: It is, sadly, true. An unhealthy mother's love is withering.
Anne Lamott
Mothering has been the richest experience of my life, but I am still opposed to Mother's Day. It perpetuates the dangerous idea that all parents are somehow superior to non-parents.
Anne Lamott
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. (Anne Lamott)
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.
Anne Lamott
I've written six novels and four pieces of nonfiction, so I don't really have a genre these days.
Anne Lamott
It's a great time to be alive.
Anne Lamott
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.
Anne Lamott
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.
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
Left to my own devices, my first inclination is to mess in other people's lives. I secretly believe my whole family, and really the whole world, is my responsibility.
Anne Lamott
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.
Anne Lamott
I don't want something special. I want something beautifully plain.
Anne Lamott
Some people won't go the extra mile, and then on their birthday, when no one makes a fuss, they feel neglected and bitter. (Anne Lamott)
I didn't write about my mother much in the third year after she died. I was still trying to get my argument straight: When her friends or our relatives wondered why I was still so hard on her, I could really lay out the case for what it had been like to be raised by someone who had loathed herself, her husband, even her own name.
Anne Lamott
I try to write the books I would love to come upon, that are honest, concerned with real lives, human hearts, spiritual transformation, families, secrets, wonder, craziness-and that can make me laugh. When I am reading a book like this, I feel rich and profoundly relieved to be in the presence of someone who will share the truth with me, and throw the lights on a little, and I try to write these kinds of books. Books, for me, are medicine.
Anne Lamott