Almost Everything: Notes on Hope

by Anne Lamott

Such beautiful comfort, the holy form, the only comfort there really is—the heart, a breath, a hand.

#truth

absolutely don’t buy into the current mania for tidiness and decluttering. For a writer, piles of papers and notes are a fertile field.

The harm is in the unwanted help or helping them when they need to figure things out for themselves. Help is the sunny side of control.

Or I pick up the three-hundred-pound phone and tell a close friend. Or

Adults rarely have the imagination or energy of children, but we do have one another, and nature, and old black-and-white movies, and the ultimate secret weapon, books. Books!

#truth

Make me a channel of Thy peace, that where there is hatred, let me sow love, or at least not fertilize the hate with my dainty bullshit.

#amen

the great secret of writing is to keep one’s butt in the chair.

if you are a writer, everything that happens is grist for the writing mill, for transformation, and just as important, for revenge. Also,

Let the energy of your story be the drama—what you’ve experienced that was so amazing or touching—instead of draping it with Christmas tree lights or sparklers. If

You can’t force people to be willing to face their pain and anger, to own the ugliness that is in all of us. You can’t. I’ve tried so hard.

anytime you experience kindness and generosity, hope, patience and caring, you are in the presence of God.

Empathy, a moment’s compassion, seeing that everyone has equal value, even people who have behaved badly, is as magnetic a force as gratitude.

stories hold us together. Stories teach us what is important about life, why we are here and how it is best to behave, and that inside us we have access to treasure, in memories and observations, in imagination. This is what I want to teach the little kids in my writing class, along with the most important thing anyone ever told me: Almost thirty years ago, when I called my mentor Horrible Bonnie at my most toxic and hysterical, having

no matter how dark the night, we offer and are offered kindness, soul, light, and food, which create breath and spaciousness, which create hope, sufficient unto the day.

#truth