You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.
Anne Lamott (b. 1954) American novelist and non-fiction writer
Bird by Bird (1995)
She attributes the quote to "my priest friend Tom"
Quotations by:
Lamott, Anne
Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.
Anne Lamott (b. 1954) American novelist and non-fiction writer
Bird by Bird, ch. 5 (1995)
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.
Anne Lamott (b. 1954) American novelist and non-fiction writer
Bird by Bird, Introduction (1995)
Expectations are resentments waiting to happen.
Anne Lamott (b. 1954) American novelist and non-fiction writer
Crooked Little Heart, ch. 4 (1997)
(Source)
She floated away on the riptide of dementia, ultimately a speck on the horizon, waving for as long as she could to her deeply confused children onshore.
Anne Lamott (b. 1954) American novelist and non-fiction writer
Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith, “Mom, Interrupted” (2007)
(Source)
On her mother's Alzheimer's Disease.
Laughter is carbonated holiness.
Anne Lamott (b. 1954) American novelist and non-fiction writer
Plan B, ch. 5 “Holy of Holies 101” (2004)
(Source)
Not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die.
Anne Lamott (b. 1954) American novelist and non-fiction writer
Traveling Mercies, ch. 3 (1999)
On Facebook (31 Jan 2013) she further wrote:
When I first got sober in '86, I first heard someone say that harboring resentment is like drinking rat poison, and waiting for the rat to die. Resenting someone is about not forgiving them -- thinking that they have done something to you so damaging or disgusting that the are beyond the pale; so therefore you are choosing to be toxic for the rest of your life, rather than to work and pray for the healing. You are willing to go through life not metabolizing the rat poison, so that this person should know what a morally repellent person you believe them to be. But the most horrible thing is that half the time, they aren't even AWARE of what it is you think they did to you. So it's a complete waste of your precious bile. When I am willing to have clogged bile ducts, because of a person who hardly thinks of me, or has no idea that he behaved like a total asshat, then I'm the crazy one.
See also Fisher.