Anne Lamott is Smarter Than Me

So here’s the skinny.

Anne Lamott is what I want to be when I grow up. Kinda/mostly.

She has long been my sister’s favorite author but I just recently stumbled across her book, “Traveling Mercies” a year and a half ago.

I didn’t know I could read a book and find myself both laughing like an insane person and weeping like a child.

My poor roommates.

Anyway, this seemed like as good of a day as any to share some of her prime juicy quotes that for me really relate to what I’m going through right now (Because duh, its always about me).

Drink up:

“My faith did not start with a leap but rather a series of staggers from what seemed like one safe place to another. Like lily pads, round and green, these places summoned and then held me up while I grew. Each prepared me for the next leaf on which I would land and in this way I moved across the swamp of doubt and fear,”

“One of the top five most annoying things about God is that He rarely answers right away. It can take days or even weeks”

“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.”

“I thought such awful thoughts that I cannot even say them out loud because they would make Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish.”

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

“Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write.  [It] was due the next day.  We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead.  Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, ‘Bird by bird, buddy.  Just take it bird by bird.’ “

“‘I liked those ladies! They were helpers, and they danced.’ These are the words I want on my gravestone: that I was a helper, and that I danced.”

After writing these down I am grinning like a Cheshire cat. Good thing I’m not in public or people would be suspicious.

But seriously, Lamott. Kudos. And peeps, pick up “Traveling Mercies” and if you’re a writer get “Bird by Bird”.

Nash-bound,

LR