"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe."
— Albert Einstein

"Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened."
— Dr. Seuss

"Forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a better past."
— Anne Lamott

"I do not understand the mystery of grace -- only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us."
— Anne Lamott

"Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They depen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. 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."
— Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life)

"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."
— Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life)

"You can either practice being right or practice being kind."
— Anne Lamott

"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."
— Anne Lamott

"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."
— Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life)

"Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining."
— Anne Lamott

"Your problem is how you are going to spend this one and precious life you have been issued. Whether you're going to spend it trying to look good and creating the illusion that you have power over circumstances, or whether you are going to taste it, enjoy it and find out the truth about who you are.

From her graduation commencement address to Berkeley."
— Anne Lamott

"And I felt like my heart had been so thoroughly and irreparably broken that there could be no real joy again, that at best there might eventually be a little contentment. Everyone wanted me to get help and rejoin life, pick up the pieces and move on, and I tried to, I wanted to, but I just had to lie in the mud with my arms wrapped around myself, eyes closed, grieving, until I didn’t have to anymore."
— Anne Lamott (Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year)

"It's good to do uncomfortable things. It's weight training for life."
— Anne Lamott (Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith)

"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.
- author Anne Lamott, in a recent interview. (Source: The Washington Times)"
— Anne Lamott

"Not forgiving is like drinking cat poison and then waiting for the rat to die."
— Anne Lamott

"I heard a preacher say recently that hope is a revolutionary patience; let me add that so is being a writer. 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."
— Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life)

"Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere."
— Anne Lamott (Bird By Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life)

"Part of me loves and respects men so desperately, and part of me thinks they are so embarrassingly incompetent at life and in love. You have to teach them the very basics of emotional literacy. You have to teach them how to be there for you, and part of me feels tender toward them and gentle, and part of me is so afraid of them, afraid of any more violation."
— Anne Lamott (Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year)

"Certainty is missing the point entirely."
— Anne Lamott (Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith)

"If you want to make God laugh, tell her your plans."
— Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life)

"No" is a complete sentence."
— Anne Lamott

"Because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be?"
— Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life)

"The opposite of faith is not doubt, it’s certainty."
— Anne Lamott

"Joy is the best makeup."
— Anne Lamott (Grace [Eventually]: Thoughts on Faith)

"This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense of--please forgive me--wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small, bordered worlds. When this happens, everything feels more spacious. Try walking around with a child who's going, "Wow, wow! Look at that dirty dog! Look at that burned-down house! Look at that red sky!" And the child points and you look, and you see, and you start going, "Wow! Look at that huge crazy hedge! Look at that teeny little baby! Look at the scary dark cloud!" I think this is how we are supposed to be in the world--present and in awe."
— Anne Lamott

"'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."
— Anne Lamott (Grace [Eventually]: Thoughts on Faith)

"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."
— Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life)

"Expectations are resentments under construction."
— Anne Lamott

"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."
— Anne Lamott (Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith)

"Forgiveness means it finally becomes unimportant that you hit back."
— Anne Lamott

"My heart was broken and my head was just barely inhabitable"
— Anne Lamott (Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith)

"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."
— Anne Lamott

"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."
— Anne Lamott

"Who was it who said that forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a different past?"
— Anne Lamott (Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith)

"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."
— Anne Lamott

"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."
— Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life)

"You can get the monkey off your back, but the circus never leaves town"
— Anne Lamott (Grace [Eventually]: Thoughts on Faith)

"I was usually filled with a sense of something like shame until I'd remember that wonderful line of Blake's- that we are here to learn to endure the beams of love- and I would take a long deep breath and force these words out of my strangulated throat: "Thank you.""
— Anne Lamott

"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. "
— Anne Lamott (Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith)

"My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I’m grateful for it the way I’m grateful for the ocean."
— Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life)

"...since you can't heal your own sick mind with your own sick mind, I needed to consult somebody else's sick mind."
— Anne Lamott

"The depth of the feeling continued to surprise and threaten me, but each time it hit again and I bore it...I would discover that it hadn't washed me away."
— Anne Lamott (Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith)

"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."
— Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life)

"So how on earth can I bring a child into the world, knowing that such sorrow lies ahead, that it is such a large part of what it means to be human?
I'm not sure. That's my answer: I'm not sure."
— Anne Lamott (Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year)

"God sent Jesus to join the human experience, which means to make a lot of mistakes. Jesus didn't arrive here knowing how to walk. He had fingers and toes, confusion, sexual feelings, crazy human internal processes. He had the same prejudices as the rest of his tribe: he had to learn that the Canaanite woman was a person. He had to suffer the hardships and tedium and setbacks of being a regular person. If he hadn't the incarnation would mean nothing."
— Anne Lamott (Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith)

"Gratitude, not understanding, is the key to equanimity."
— Anne Lamott

"[Her] work taught me that you could be all the traditional feminine things -- a mother, a lover, a listener, a nurturer -- and you could also be critically astute and radical and have a minority opinion that was profoundly moral."
— Anne Lamott (Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith)

"'I've given guys blow jobs just because I've run out of things to talk about.'
'Oh, Rae. Who hasn't'"
— Anne Lamott (Crooked Little Heart: A Novel)

"...because when people have seen you at their worst, you don't have to put on the mask as much."
— Anne Lamott (Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith)

"But you can’t get to any of these truths by sitting in a field smiling beatifically, avoiding your anger and damage and grief. Your anger and damage and grief are the way to the truth. We don’t have much truth to express unless we have gone into those rooms and closets and woods and abysses that we were told not go in to. When we have gone in and looked around for a long while, just breathing and finally taking it in – then we will be able to speak in our own voice and to stay in the present moment. And that moment is home."
— Anne Lamott