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
The whistle is always waiting to be blown, and in some ways, it gets me to do better work.
Anne Lamott
I am not writing to try and convert people to fundamental Christianity. I am just trying to share my experience, strength and hope, that someone who is as messed up and neurotic and scarred and scared can be fully accepted by our dear Lord, no questions asked.
Anne Lamott
I was raised with no religious training or influence. Except the influence was to be a moral and ethical person at the secular level. And to be a peace marcher, an activist for civil rights, peace and justice.
Anne Lamott
I've known for years that resentments don't hurt the person we resent, but they do hurt us.
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
For me, Jesus is my cleft in the rock. He is my safest friend, my safe totally loving accepting big brother.
Anne Lamott
I'm kind of a gossip hound, but watching the media whip the small fires into giant forest fires so that they can cover the result is infuriating.
Anne Lamott
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.
Anne Lamott
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.
Anne Lamott
I spent my whole life helping my mother carry around her psychic trunks like a bitter bellhop. So a great load was lifted when she died, and my life was much easier.
Anne Lamott
My mother might find a thin gold chain at the back of a drawer, wadded into an impossibly tight knot, and give it to me to untangle. It would have a shiny, sweaty smell, and excite me: Gold chains linked you to the great fairy tales and myths, to Arabia, and India; to the great weight of the world, but lighter than a feather.
Anne Lamott
You want to give me chocolate and flowers? That would be great. I love them both. I just don't want them out of guilt, and I don't want them if you're not going to give them to all the people who helped mother our children.
Anne Lamott
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.
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 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
I like to read away as much of the afternoon as possible, until real life rears its ugly head.
Anne Lamott
I do not have deep theological understanding or opinion, but I do not read the Bible as the literal word of God.
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
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.
Anne Lamott
The first holy truth in God 101 is that men and women of true faith have always had to accept the mystery of God's identity and love and ways. I hate that, but it's the truth.
Anne Lamott
I did not raise my son, Sam, to celebrate Mother's Day. I didn't want him to feel some obligation to buy me pricey lunches or flowers, some annual display of gratitude that you have to grit your teeth and endure.
Anne Lamott
Bananas are great, as I believe them to be the only known cure for existential dread. Also, Mother Teresa said that in India, a woman dying in the street will share her banana with anyone who needs it, whereas in America, people amass and hoard as many bananas as they can to sell for an exorbitant profit. So half of them go bad, anyway.
Anne Lamott
Mothers are supposed to listen and, afterward, to respond with some wisdom and perspective, but these things were not my mother's strong suit.
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
The earth is rocky and full of roots; it's clay, and it seems doomed and polluted, but you dig little holes for the ugly shriveled bulbs, throw in a handful of poppy seeds, and cover it all over, and you know you'll never see it again - it's death and clay and shrivel, and your hands are nicked from the rocks, your nails black with soil.
Anne Lamott
My mother was a not-too-devoted atheist. She went to Episcopal church on Christmas Eve every year, and that was mostly it.
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
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.
Anne Lamott
Alice Adams wrote a sweet note to me after my first novel came out when I was 26, and I was so blown away that I sent her a bunch of stamps by return mail. I have no idea what I was thinking. It was a star-struck impulse.
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
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.
Anne Lamott
I wish I had thrown out the bathroom scale at age 16. Weighing yourself every morning is like waking up and asking Dick Cheney to validate your sense of inner worth.
Anne Lamott
When we're dealing with the people in our family - no matter how annoying or gross they may be, no matter how self-inflicted their suffering may appear, no matter how afflicted they are with ignorance, prejudice or nose hairs - we give from the deepest parts of ourselves.
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
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