Anne Lamott

“I was the angriest daughter on earth, and also, one of the most devoted.”

“Your experiences will be yours alone. But truth and best friendship will rarely if ever disappoint you.”

“I woke up full of hate and fear the day before the most recent peace march in San Francisco. This was disappointing: I'd hoped to wake up feeling somewhere between Virginia Woolf and Wavy Gr...”

“Presents can make up for some of the disappointments that life doles out, such as it makes almost no sense and is coming to an end more quickly than ever.”

“I think Jesus is divine love manifest on Earth, as it comes through the community of Christians.”

“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.”

“We can't understand when we're pregnant, or when our siblings are expecting, how profound it is to have a shared history with a younger generation: blood, genes, humor. It means we were actu...”

“All parents are an embarrassment to their kids. Often, grandparents are the relief. Kids don't have to resist you.”

“I am the woman I grew to be partly in spite of my mother, and partly because of the extraordinary love of her best friends, and my own best friends' mothers, and from surrogates, many of who...”

“Every woman's path is difficult, and many mothers were as equipped to raise children as wire monkey mothers. I say that without judgment: It is, sadly, true. An unhealthy mother's love is wi...”

“I go to church every Sunday, which is like going to the gas station once a week and really, really filling up.”

“If our lives are made up of a string of a thousand moments, at some of those moments we look a lot more spiritually evolved than at others.”

“When hope is not pinned wriggling onto a shiny image or expectation, it sometimes floats forth and opens.”

“Some people won't go the extra mile, and then on their birthday, when no one makes a fuss, they feel neglected and bitter.”

“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.”

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

“I don't have very sophisticated taste in music. I listen to a lot of folk music. I like reggae.”

“My mother's eyes were large and brown, like my son's, but unlike Sam's, they were always frantic, like a hummingbird who can't quite find the flower but keeps jabbing around.”

“The Giants are usually described as rag tag, kind of a great garage sale team, and the Democrats are described as the Mommies to the Republican Daddies; and everyone hates the mommies, but w...”

“I've written six novels and four pieces of nonfiction, so I don't really have a genre these days.”