Anne Lamott Life Quotations

You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.

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.

Everyone is flailing through this life without an owner's manual, with whatever modicum of grace and good humor we can manage.

Some people seem to understand this - that life and change take time - but I am not one of those people.

I like to read away as much of the afternoon as possible, until real life rears its ugly head.

What fills us is real, sweet, dopey, funny life.

Life is like a recycling center, where all the concerns and dramas of humankind get recycled back and forth across the universe. But what you have to offer is your own sensibility, maybe your own sense of humor or insider pathos or meaning. All of us can sing the same song, and there will still be four billion different renditions.

If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. Otherwise, you'll just be rearranging furniture in rooms you've already been in.

You get your confidence and intuition back by trusting yourself, by being militantly on your own side. ... Don't look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.

Clutter and mess show us that life is being lived.

...It really IS easier to experience spiritual connection when your life is in the process of coming apart.

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.

Sometimes it feels like God has reached down and touched me, blessed me a thousand times over, and sometimes it all feels like a mean joke, like God's advisers are Muammar Qaddafi and Phyllis Schlafly.

Living on Earth has always been a dangerous way to spend your time.