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 wha….

Anyone who has ever experienced love knows that you can have too much or too little. You can have love that parches, love that defeats. You can have ….

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

Sometimes you imagine that everything could have been different for you, that if only you had gone right one day when you chose to go left, you would….

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….

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

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 beg….

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

I always try to stay as quiet as possible about a book until it's finished..

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

You remember having friends who used to lampoon the world so effortlessly, crouching at the verge of every joke and waiting to pounce on it, and you ….

I'm uncommonly slow to show my work to other people, and by the time I do I've usually exhausted myself so completely that all I really want is for s….

Sometimes they rose up inside her, these moments of fierce happiness, kindling out of their own substance like a spark igniting a mound of grass. It ….

...When you die, the energy that kept you alive filters into the people you loved. Did you know that? It's like a fire you've tended all your life, a….

You could not presume that people were healthy. You could not presume that they would welcome the little nudges and jostlings of life. You had to beh….

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 ironica….

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

There was no one alive who did not contribute his share of mystery to the world..

It's like you're born with all these blessings, only you don't realize they're blessings until you lose them. And if you're thick-headed enough, like….

The books you love best - those are the immensity of the sea..