Anne Lamott

"She had come planning to swim, which I hadn’t as the water is too cold for me, and she took off all her clothes, right there and then. “Do you feel shy?” I asked as she walked to the bank. “Nope. This here is what I done got. This is what me being alive looks like now.""

"The game of life is hard, and a lot of us are playing hurt."

"We know by a certain age the great palace lies of the culture — if you buy or do or achieve this or that, you will be happy and rich. Nope. Love and service make us rich."

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

"Not forgiving is like drinking rat poison, and then waiting around for the rat to die."

"Laughter is carbonated holiness."

"The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns. Faith also means reaching deeply within, for the sense one was born with, the sense, for example, to go for a walk."

"When you're conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader."

"Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining."

"Joy is the best makeup."

"Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you."

"So Rita and I decided that the most subversive, revolutionary thing I could do was to show up for my life and not be ashamed."

"Do I think the sky is falling? Sort of."

"100 years from now? All new people."

"..I thought the secret of life was obvious: be here now, love as if your whole life depended on it, find your life's work, and try to get hold of a giant panda."