someone you wouldn't mind being

I'm reading a book by Anne Lamott right now. Joe Jones. It's the only one of hers I hadn't read, and it was the first one she wrote. It'd been out of print for awhile, but someone finally came to their senses and republished it a few years ago.

I'm only 35 pages into the book, and I've already marked 4 quotes. It happens that 3 of them either were intended to be epitaphs, or could easily be epitaphs.

Joe had been lying down in his mother's lanai all day, in the mood Louise calls the "His Dog Loved Him, But She Died."

"Do you know what Hitchcock wanted written on his tombstone?" she asked him one time. "'This is what we DO to bad little boys.'"

and

-- this is what I'm calling my biography, Louise: It seemed like a good idea at the time.

But the quote that has gotten to me most so far (mostly because it seems so simple and obvious and something I have not always done...)

Really, she thinks to herself, you ought to be in love with someone you wouldn't mind being.