Most marriages are a mess, and the children get caught between two bitter, antagonistic parents. My parents stayed married for 27 unhappy years, till their kids were grown, and this was a catastrophe for us. – 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
I was raised by my parents to believe that you had a moral obligation to try and help save the world. – Anne Lamott
Summer nearly does me in every year. It’s too hot and the light is unforgiving and the days go on way too long. – Anne Lamott
E-books are great for instant gratification – you see a review somewhere of a book that interests you, and you can start reading it five minutes later. – 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’m much calmer as I get older, but I’m still just as capable of getting that strung-out stressed-out feeling of mental and spiritual unwellness. – 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
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 quit my last real job, as a writer at a magazine, when I was twenty-one. That was the moment when I lost my place of prestige on the fast track, and slowly, millimeter by millimeter, I started to get found, to discover who I had been born to be, instead of the impossibly small package, all tied up tightly in myself, that I had agreed to be. – Anne Lamott
I would seriously rather be in a long line at the DMV than eat with people I don’t know. – Anne Lamott
I went to Goucher College in Maryland for the best possible reasons – to learn – but then I dropped out at 19 for the best possible reasons – to become a writer. – 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 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
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
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
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 feel incredibly successful. I make a living as a writer and am able to help support a big family, my church, my bleeding-heart causes. – 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
No one tells you that your life is effectively over when you have a child: that you’re never going to draw another complacent breath again… or that whatever level of hypochondria and rage you’d learned to repress and live with is going to seem like the good old days. – 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 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
I am skittish about relationships, as most of the marriages I’ve seen up close have been ruinous for one or both parties. – Anne Lamott
The whistle is always waiting to be blown, and in some ways, it gets me to do better work. – 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