Who was it who said that every virtue contains its corresponding vice? C.S. Lewis? Virginia Woolf? You forget. But it has always worried you that what the virtue of wit contained was the vice of scorn.

You have a pet theory, one you have been turning over for years, that life itself is a kind of Rube Goldberg device, an extremely complicated machine designed to carry out the extremely simple task of constructing your soul.

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

Worry is a mean-faced dwarf who beats on your heart like a kettledrum.

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

I write out of gratitude for all the books I have loved over the years.

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.