Anne Lamott

There is nothing as sweet as a comeback, when you are down and out, about to lose, and out of time.

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.

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor.

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.

We must not inflict life on children who will be resented; we must not inflict unwanted children on society.

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

I do not at all understand the mystery of grace only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.

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

Seeing yourself in print is such an amazing concept: you can get so much attention without having to actually show up somewhere... You don't have to dress up, for instance, and you can't hear them boo you right away.

It was simple reality most competitive tennis players in my day were privileged, spoiled, entitled and white. Also, many of them were beautiful, fit, tan and of good stock great big hair and white teeth and long legs. Then there were the rest of us.

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 wait, wait I didn't intend to get into the pathos and thrill of being a Democratic Giants fan.

No one is more sentimentalized in America than mothers on Mother's Day, but no one is more often blamed for the culture's bad people and behavior.

You want to give me chocolate and flowers? That would be great. I love them both. I just don't want them out of guilt, and I don't want them if you're not going to give them to all the people who helped mother our children.

I don't want something special. I want something beautifully plain.

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 whom were not women at all but gay men. I have loved them my entire life, even after their passing.