Top 100 Anne Lamott Quotes
#1. I love memoirs. They are probably my favorite literary form, along with biographies. The more confessional, the better. There is so, so, so little truth in the popular culture, and I am starved and grateful for any I can find.
Anne Lamott
#2. I honestly think that in order to be a writer you have to learn to be reverent. If not, why are you writing? Why are you here?
Anne Lamott
#4. It is a violation of trust to use your kids as caulking for the cracks in you.
Anne Lamott
#5. Most of us have done fairly well in our lives. We learned how to run on that one wheel, but now we want a refund.
Anne Lamott
#6. Publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is.
Anne Lamott
#7. But you have to remind yourself that perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor.
Anne Lamott
#8. 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.
Anne Lamott
#9. I was raised with no religious training or influence. Except the influence was to be a moral and ethical person at the secular level. And to be a peace marcher, an activist for civil rights, peace and justice.
Anne Lamott
#10. I told myself that historically when people do too well too quickly, they are a Greek tragedy waiting to happen.
Anne Lamott
#11. Every Sunday I nudge Sam in her direction, and he walks to where she is sitting and hugs her. She smells him behind the ears, where he most smells like sweet unwashed new potatoes. This is in fact what I think God may smell like, a young child's slightly dirty neck.
Anne Lamott
#12. Why do we make it all seem like a crisis, over and over again? Why do we worry it all to death, like dogs with socks or chew-toys? 'Look at it this way ... In a hundred years? - All new people.
Anne Lamott
#13. Addicts and alcoholics will tell you that their recovery began when they woke up in pitiful and degraded enough shape to take Step Zero, which is: "This shit has got to stop.
Anne Lamott
#14. Usually if you pray from the heart, you get an answer - the phone rings or the mail comes, and light gets in through the cracks, so you can see the next right thing to do. That's all you need.
Anne Lamott
#15. Your inside person doesn't age. Your inside person is soul, is heart, in the eternal now, the ageless, the old, the young, all the ages you've ever been.
Anne Lamott
#16. We all often feel like we are pulling teeth, even those writers whose prose ends up being the most natural and fluid. The right words and sentences just do not come pouring out like ticker tape most of the time.
Anne Lamott
#17. I remember staring at my son endlessly when he was an infant, stunned by his very existence, wondering where on earth he had come from.
Anne Lamott
#18. For somebody to be on a search means he or she is involved with these subversive topics, reading and comparing notes with allies, asking questions, daydreaming, brooding. Even though you have homework to do.
Anne Lamott
#19. Anything you say from your heart to God is a prayer. But "why" is rarely a useful question. When Job keeps asking God why he has had such loss and suffering, God says, "You wouldn't understand." I always want to know why, and I almost never have a good answer.
Anne Lamott
#20. I felt changed and a little crazy. But though I was still like a stained and slightly buckled jigsaw puzzle with some pieces missing, now there were at least a few border pieces in place.
Anne Lamott
#21. In biblical times, they used to stone a few thirteen-year-olds with some regularity, which helped keep the others quiet and at home. The mothers were usually in the first row of stone throwers, and had to be restrained.
Anne Lamott
#22. This is one thing they forget to mention in most child-rearing books, that at times you will just lose your mind. Period.
Anne Lamott
#23. Summer nearly does me in every year. It's too hot and the light is unforgiving and the days go on way too long.
Anne Lamott
#24. Write regularly, whether you feel like writing or not, and whether you think what you're writing is any good or not.
Anne Lamott
#26. Spring is sweet, the baby season; summer is the teenage season -- too much energy, too much growth and beauty and heat and late nights, none of them what they are cracked up to be. Fall is the older season, a more seasoned season. The weather surrounds you instead of beating down on you.
Anne Lamott
#27. It feels like I'm babysitting in the Twilight Zone. I keep waiting for the parents to show up because we are out of chips and diet cokes.
Anne Lamott
#28. When you love something like reading - or drawing or music or nature - it surrounds you with a sense of connection to something great.
Anne Lamott
#29. his cell phone - the adolescent's pacemaker.
Anne Lamott
#30. The women's movement burst forth when I was fifteen. That was when I began to believe that life might semi-work out after all. The cavalry had arrived. Women were starting to say that you got to tell the truth now, that you had to tell the truth if you were going to heal and have an authentic life.
Anne Lamott
#31. Jesus was soft on crime. He'd never have been elected anything.
Anne Lamott
#32. All I know is that after 10 years of being sober, with huge support to express my pain and anger and shadow, the grief and tears didn't wash me away. They gave me my life back! They cleansed me, baptized me, hydrated the earth at my feet. They brought me home, to me, to the truth of me.
Anne Lamott
#33. Who knows how much of our stories are true?
Anne Lamott
#34. There are really places in your heart that you don't know exist until you love a child.
Anne Lamott
#35. Writing like this is a little like milking a cow: the milk is so rich and delicious, and the cow is so glad you did it.
Anne Lamott
#36. It took me one more year to admit that I could no longer control my drinking. And finally on July 7, 1986, I quit, and let a bunch of sober alcoholics teach me how to get sober, and stay sober. God, they were such a pain in the ass.
Anne Lamott
#37. Why couldn't Jesus command us to obsess over everything, to try to control and manipulate people, to try not to breathe at all, or to pay attention, stomp away to brood when people annoy us, and then eat a big bag of Hershey's Kisses in bed?
Anne Lamott
#38. My main problem is that over and over again, I try to get all my characters to say stuff that I think is so witty or erudite you know, so that everybody will go.
Anne Lamott
#39. Mother's Day celebrates a huge lie about the value of women: that mothers are superior beings, that they have done more with their lives and chosen a more difficult path.
Anne Lamott
#40. She quoted the Reverend James Forbes as saying, Nobody gets into heaven without a letter of reference from the poor.
Anne Lamott
#41. Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers.
Anne Lamott
#43. Robert Burns said it best: Life is but a day at most.
Anne Lamott
#44. If I have a huge audience, I'd like a bigger audience; maybe slightly a slightly more illustrious audience.
Anne Lamott
#46. Mothers are supposed to listen and, afterward, to respond with some wisdom and perspective, but these things were not my mother's strong suit.
Anne Lamott
#47. I'm drawn to almost any piece of writing with the words 'divine love' and 'impeachment' in the first sentence. But I know the word 'divine' makes many progressive people run screaming for their cute little lives, and so one hesitates to use it.
Anne Lamott
#48. If you asked me, parents were supposed to affect the life of their child in such a way that the child grows up to be responsible, able to participate in life and in community.
Anne Lamott
#49. Everybody thinks their opinion is the right one. If they didn't, they would get a new one.
Anne Lamott
#50. Some people have a thick skin and you don't. Your heart is really open and that is going to cause pain, but that is an appropriate response to this world.
Anne Lamott
#51. Anyone who survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life.
Anne Lamott
#53. That grace is having a commitment to - or at least an acceptance of - being ineffective and foolish.
Anne Lamott
#54. I just can't get over how much babies cry. I really had no idea what I was getting into. To tell you the truth, I thought it would be more like getting a cat.
Anne Lamott
#55. I'm human, you're human, let me greet your humanness. Let's be people together for a while.
Anne Lamott
#56. One thing about having a baby is that each step of the way you simply cannot imagine loving him any more than you already do, because you are bursting with love, loving as much as you are humanly capable of- and then you do, you love him even more.
Anne Lamott
#57. One secret of life is that the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day. Another secret is that laughter is carbonated holiness
Anne Lamott
#58. You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your unconscious to kick in for you creatively.
Anne Lamott
#59. I rest in silence and music and long strides, while Sam rests in noise and motion.
Anne Lamott
#60. If we can believe in the Gnostic gospel of Thomas, old Uncle Jesus said, If you bring forth what is inside you, what you bring forth will save you. If you don't bring forth what is inside you, what you bring forth can destroy you.
Anne Lamott
#61. He got me a cup of tea with honey, toast with honey, yogurt with honey, like I was John the Baptist with the flu.
Anne Lamott
#62. What's the difference between you and God? God never thinks he's you.
Anne Lamott
#63. The challenge and the dignity make it interesting enough. Besides,
Anne Lamott
#65. The depth of the feeling continued to surprise and threaten me, but each time it hit again and I bore it ... I would discover that it hadn't washed me away.
Anne Lamott
#66. It's funny where we look for salvation, and where we actually find it.
Anne Lamott
#67. They got to be so conceited because they were Catholics.
Anne Lamott
#68. In early sobriety I heard that if you have an idea after ten p.m., it is probably not a good idea - and this was before e-mail.
Anne Lamott
#69. Believing isn't the hard part; waiting on God is. So I stuck with it and prayed impatiently for patience, and to stop feeling disgusted by myself, and to believe for a few moments that God, just a bit busy with other suffering in the world, actually cared about one menopausal white woman on a binge.
Anne Lamott
#70. Rosie [her teenage daughter] had a secret life now, was putting together her own tribe, finding her identity there, and it was great to see, and it hurt like hell.
Anne Lamott
#71. The American way is to not need help, but to help.
Anne Lamott
#72. Joy is the best makeup. But a little lipstick is a close runner-up.
Anne Lamott
#73. Mine was a patchwork God, sewn together from bits of rag and ribbon, Eastern and Western, pagan and Hebrew, everything but the kitchen sink and Jesus.
Anne Lamott
#74. Trying to reason with an addict was like trying to blow out a lightbulb.
Anne Lamott
#75. Just don't pretend you know more about your characters than they do, because you don't. Stay open to them. It's teatime and all the dolls are at the table. Listen. It's that simple.
Anne Lamott
#76. Slowly, after dozens of rejection slips and failures and false starts and postponed dreams
what Langston Hughes called dreams deferred
I stepped onto the hallowed ground of being a published novelist, and then, fifteen years later, I started to make real money.
Anne Lamott
#77. I've gotten endless signs of the greatness of God's love and hilarious care, but I always end up needing a newer sign, maybe one that is cuter and more spangly.
Anne Lamott
#78. It is most comfortable to be invisible, to observe life from a distance, at one with our own intoxicating superior thoughts. But comfort and isolation are not where the surprises are. They are not where hope is.
Anne Lamott
#79. You have to keep taking the next necessary stitch, and the next one, and the next. Without stitches, you just have rags. And we are not rags.
Anne Lamott
#80. I tell you, families are definitely the training ground for forgiveness.
Anne Lamott
#81. Your problem is how you are going to spend this one 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 circumstances, or whether you are going to taste it, enjoy it and find out the truth about who you are.
Anne Lamott
#82. I do believe that God is with us even when we're at our craziest and that this goodness guides, provides, and protects.
Anne Lamott
#83. I knew to put on my favorite earrings. Sometimes you start with the outside and you get it right. You tend to your spirit through the body.
Anne Lamott
#84. So how on earth can I bring a child into the world, knowing that such sorrow lies ahead, that it is such a large part of what it means to be human?
I'm not sure. That's my answer: I'm not sure.
Anne Lamott
#85. Left to my own devices, my first inclination is to mess in other people's lives. I secretly believe my whole family, and really the whole world, is my responsibility.
Anne Lamott
#86. Take care of yourselves; take care of one another.
Anne Lamott
#87. Rosie had been a little girl with a dead dad, and there was no getting around that or over that. Even a drunk dad, even an asshole, was better than a dead dad, which shouldn't reflect on you but did, and left a cannon hole in your heart. [p. 121]
Anne Lamott
#88. Since you can't heal your own sick mind with your own sick mind, I needed to consult somebody else's sick mind.
Anne Lamott
#89. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard. So
Anne Lamott
#90. We're bugs struggling in the river, brightly visible to the trout below.
Anne Lamott
#91. It gets darker and darker, and then Jesus is born. That line came back to me, from out of nowhere, and I decided to practice radical hope, hope in the face of not having a clue.
Anne Lamott
#92. I am going to notice the lights of the earth, the sun and the moon and the stars, the lights of our candles as we march, the lights with which spring teases us, the light that is already present.
Anne Lamott
#94. When you pray, you are not starting the conversation from scratch, just remembering to plug back into a conversation that's always in progress.
Anne Lamott
#95. The movement of grace toward gratitude brings us from the package of self-obsessed madness to a spiritual awakening. Gratitude is peace.
Anne Lamott
#96. Once you know where true is, it defines everything else that has to happen.
Anne Lamott
#97. We can see Spirit made visible when people are kind to one another, especially when it's a really busy person, like you, taking care of a needy, annoying, neurotic person, like you.
Anne Lamott
#98. Say it's true: It is what it is. We're social, tribal, musical animals, walking percussion instruments. Most of us do the best we can. We show up. We strive for gratitude, and try not to be such babies.
Anne Lamott
#99. It's so awful, attacking your child. It's the worse thing I know, to shout loudly at this 50 lb. being with his huge trusting brown eyes. It's like bitch-slapping E.T.
Anne Lamott
#100. The beginning of forgiveness is often exhaustion. You're pooped; thank God.
Anne Lamott
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