“If you don’t die of thirst, there are blessings in the desert. You can be pulled into limitlessness, which we all yearn for, or you can do the beauty of minutiae, the scrimshaw of tiny and precise. The sky is your ocean, and the crystal silence will uplift you like great gospel music, or Neil Young.”

When life and the world seem oppressively banal and empty of good humor and insight, a little bit of Anne Lamott goes a long way. For this Saturday, as I catch my breath from a week that felt like a month, I give you quotes from an author who stands about 10 feet tall in my mind’s eye.

“I am going to try to pay attention to the spring. I am going to look around at all the flowers, and look up at the hectic trees. I am going to close my eyes and listen.”

“I do not at all understand the mystery of grace – only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.”

“Your problem is how you are going to spend this one odd and precious life you have been issued. Whether you’re going to spend it trying to look good and creating the illusion that you have power over people and circumstances, or whether you are going to taste it, enjoy it and find out the truth about who you are.”

“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.”

“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.”

“For me, Jesus is my cleft in the rock. He is my safest friend, my safe totally loving accepting big brother.”

“I am not writing to try and convert people to fundamental Christianity. I am just trying to share my experience, strength and hope, that someone who is as messed up and neurotic and scarred and scared can be fully accepted by our dear Lord, no questions asked.”