Almost Everything: Notes on Hope

by Anne Lamott

Help is the sunny side of control.

I began trying to save my parents almost before I could speak,

Ram Dass said that if you think you’re enlightened, go spend a week with your family.

(In recovery, we call fine “Fucked-up, Insecure, Neurotic, and Emotional.”)

Booker T. Washington said, “I shall allow no man to belittle my soul by making me hate him,”

everything that has happened to you belongs to you. If people wanted you to write more warmly about them, they should have behaved better.

Shakespeare said we all owe God a death.

Most of my spiritual breakthroughs have been against my will.

Families are hard partly because of expectations, that the people in them are supposed to mesh, and expectations are resentments under construction.