Grace means suddenly you’re in a different universe from the one where you were stuck, and there was absolutely no way for you to get there on your own.
Getting found almost always means being lost for a while.
Forgiveness means it finally becomes unimportant for you to hit back. You’re done. It doesn’t necessarily mean you want to vacation together.
For somebody to be on a search means he or she is involved with these subversive topics, reading and comparing notes with allies, asking questions, daydreaming, brooding. Even though you have homework...
For instance, I used to think that paired opposites were a given, that love was the opposite of hate, right the opposite of wrong. But now I think we sometimes buy into these concepts because it is so...
Everyone was on God's payroll, whether they knew it or not.
Every sound is by definition a stop, which is how we can hear it.
Even if only the people in your writing group read your memoirs or stories or novel, even if you only wrote your story so that one day your children would know what life was like when you were a child...
E.L. Doctorow said once said that 'Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.' You don't have to see where yo...
E. L. Doctorow once said that writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. You don’t have to see where you’re g...
During Advent, we have to sit in our own anxiety and funkiness long enough to know what a Promised Land would be like, or, to put it another way, what it means to be saved--which, if we are to believe...
Dreadlocks make people wonder if you’re trying to be rebellious.
Close your eyes and get quiet for a minute, until the chatter starts up. Then isolate one of the voices and imagine the person speaking as a mouse. Pick it up by the tail and drop it into a mason jar....
But I try to make sure they understand that writing, and even getting good at it, and having books and stories and articles published, will not open the doors that most of them hope for. It will not m...
And I guess when you take away the resentment and disappointment, it's that simple. It is what we do in families: we help, because we were helped.
About novel by Anne Lamott.Q: What does the title Imperfect Birds mean?
What good people can do in the face of great sorrow. We help some time pass for those suffering. We sit with them in their hopeless pain and feel terrible with them, without trying to fix them with pl...
Music is about as physical as it gets: your essential rhythm is your heartbeat; your essential sound, the breath. We're walking temples of noise, and when you add tender hearts to this mix, it somehow...
I think joy and sweetness and affection are a spiritual path. We're here to know God, to love and serve God, and to be blown away by the beauty and miracle of nature. You just have to get rid of so mu...
Whatever you come up with needs to suggest a voice that you are not trying to control. If you’re lost in the forest, let the horse find the way home. You have to stop directing, because you will only...