I might not remember how the sky looked on any given day. I do remember, though, what it was like to be a boy beneath a sky.

I had always been the kind of boy who was quick to laugh and quick to cry.

How often, you wonder, has the direction of your life been shaped by such misunderstandings? How many opportunities have you been denied--or, for that matter, awarded--because someone failed to see you properly? How many friends have you lost, how many have you gained, because they glimpsed some element of your personality that shone through for only an instant, and in circumstances you could never reproduce? An illusion of water shimmering at the far bend of a highway.

I was also ready to believe, though, that whatever good things I had managed to set upright could topple at any second.

People who read Anne Lamott, like people who read Anne Rice, believe that tragedy is romantic, but the people who read Anne Lamott believe it ironically.

I suppose that when you're growing up, you're bound to reach an age when you feel buffeted by all the changes in your life, when either your mind begins outpacing your body or your body begins outpacing your mind and you're not quite in conversation with yourself anymore.

The living carry us inside them like pearls. We survive only so long as they remember us.