Top 100 Lamott Quotes
#1. You can safely assume you've remade God in your own image when it turns out God hates the same people you do. Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
Janis Bragan Balda
#2. Friendship is above all the art of allowing the soft light of love to fall upon even our darkest sides." - Anne Lamott
Erica Miles
#3. You own everything that happend to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.
-- Anne Lamott
Doreen Carvajal
#4. The writer Anne Lamott says, "You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do."28
Parker J. Palmer
#6. Anne Lamott's priest friend Tom, how to get through:
"Left foot, right foot, left foot, breathe," he said. "Right foot, left foot, right foot, breathe."
Salon April 25, 2003
Anne Lamott
#7. I wanted to produce Nancy LaMott's albums, so I created my own record company.
David Friedman
#8. Anne Lamott: The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty.
Brene Brown
#9. 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 ironically.
Kevin Brockmeier
#10. As for music, my tastes are eclectic. Elvis Costello is my all-time favorite. I listen to a lot of jazz, primarily the great female vocalists, and I am very fond of the late cabaret singer Nancy Lamott.
Laura Lippman
#11. Radical self-care is what we've been longing for, desperate for, our entire lives-friendship with our own hearts.
Anne Lamott
#12. 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
#13. And I guess when you take away the resentment and disappointment, it's that simple. It is what we do in families: we help, because we were helped.
Anne Lamott
#14. To be a good writer, you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care. You do not have to have a complicated moral philosophy. But a writer always tries, I think, to be a part of a solution, to understand a little about life and to pass this on.
Anne Lamott
#15. The clipping said forgiveness meant that God is for giving, and that we are here for giving too, and that to withold love or blessings is to be completely delusional.
Anne Lamott
#16. I cry intermittently, like a summer rain. I don't feel racked by the crying; in fact, it hydrates me. Then rage wells up in me, and I want to take a crowbar to all the cars in the neighborhood.
Anne Lamott
#17. 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
#18. I'm a terrible Christian and meditating is very hard for me, and I do it. I do it badly, like I do a lot of things. I believe in doing things badly.
Anne Lamott
#19. If our lives are made up of a string of a thousand moments, at some of those moments we look a lot more spiritually evolved than at others.
Anne Lamott
#20. All I ever wanted since I arrived here on earth are the same things I needed as a baby, to go from cold to warm, lonely to held, the vessel to the giver, empty to full.
Anne Lamott
#21. I used to tell my writing students that they must write the books they wished they could come upon - because then the books they hungered and thirsted for would exist.
Anne Lamott
#22. It speaks of such integrity to refuse to pretend that you're doing well just to help other people deal with the fact that sometimes we face an impossible loss.
Anne Lamott
#23. Sometimes, no matter how screwed up things seem, I feel like we're all at a wedding. But you can't just come out and say, We're at a wedding! Have some cake! You need to create a world into which we can enter, a world where we can see this.
Anne Lamott
#25. One line of dialogue that rings true reveals character in a way that pages of description can't.
Anne Lamott
#26. If you have a problem you can solve by throwing money at it, you don't have a very interesting problem.
Anne Lamott
#27. Talking to the parents of older kids was helpful for me, since the parents of kids the same age as yours won't admit how horrible their children are ... you can either practice being right or practice being kind. Screaming in the car helped. [p. 94]
Anne Lamott
#28. You should not bring more items and hurdles to the obstacle course.
Anne Lamott
#29. Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.
Anne Lamott
#30. Usually with life, you start wherever you are, and you flail around for a while
Anne Lamott
#31. Nothing is as important as a likable narrator. Nothing holds a story together better.
Anne Lamott
#32. It is a violation of trust to use your kids as caulking for the cracks in you.
Anne Lamott
#33. For too long, and despite what people told me, I had fallen for what the culture said about beauty, youth, features, heights, weights, hair textures, upper arms.
Anne Lamott
#34. Jesus said that whatever you did to the least of his people, you did to him, and the lifers in penitentiaries are the leastest people in this country. Just look to see whose budgets are being cut these days -- the old, the crazies, the children in Head Start -- and that's where Jesus will be.
Anne Lamott
#35. My dad taught me that to be a writer is a decision and a habit. It's not anything lofty, and it doesn't have that much to do with inspiration. You have to develop the habit of being a certain way with yourself. You do it at the debt of honor.
Anne Lamott
#36. We can't understand when we're pregnant, or when our siblings are expecting, how profound it is to have a shared history with a younger generation: blood, genes, humor. It means we were actually here, on Earth, for a time - like the Egyptians with their pyramids, only with children.
Anne Lamott
#37. You want to give me chocolate and flowers? That would be great. I love them both. I just don't want them out of guilt, and I don't want them if you're not going to give them to all the people who helped mother our children.
Anne Lamott
#38. My family tends to be pretty alcoholic and drug-addicted.
Anne Lamott
#39. There is nothing as sweet as a comeback, when you are down and out, about to lose, and out of time.
Anne Lamott
#40. I am positive of only a few things in life, and one is that if you want to have a decent middle and old age, you have to get exercise almost every day.
Anne Lamott
#41. My experience as a writer is that you really do write seven and eight pages to find the paragraph you were after all along.
Anne Lamott
#42. 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.
Anne Lamott
#43. I naturally prefer the company of people who hold grudges, as long as they are not held against me.
Anne Lamott
#44. You don't always have to chop with the sword of truth. You can point with it too.
Anne Lamott
#45. 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
#46. When Sam was six or so, he explained to me why we call God "God": "Because when you see something so great, you just go, 'God!
Anne Lamott
#47. I was reminded of the Four Immutable Laws of the Spirit: Whoever is present are the right people. Whenever it begins is the right time. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened. And when it's over, it's over.
Anne Lamott
#48. After a while the middle-aged person who lives in her head begins to talk to her soul, the kid.
Anne Lamott
#49. Into every life crap will fall. Most of us do as well as possible, and some of it works okay, and we try to release that which doesn't and which is never going to.
Anne Lamott
#50. And yet, I do believe there is ultimately meaning in the chaos, and also in the doldrums. What I resist is not the truth but when people put a pretty bow on scary things instead of saying, 'This is a nightmare. I hate everything. I'm going to go hide in the garage.'
Anne Lamott
#51. How do you begin? The answer is simple: you decide to.
Anne Lamott
#52. Do you mind even a little that you are still addicted to people-pleasing, and are still putting everyone else's needs and laundry and career ahead of your creative, spiritual life? Giving all your life force away, to "help" and impress. Well, your help is not helpful, and falls short.
Anne Lamott
#53. He is a writer. He makes the rest of them nervous.
Anne Lamott
#54. All that is holding us together [is] stories and compassion.
Anne Lamott
#55. Lies cannot nourish or protect you. Only freedom from fear, freedom from lies, can make us beautiful, and keep us safe.
Anne Lamott
#56. Mattie was in love with Daniel, of course; this was the X within the circle on her map: I love Daniel.
Anne Lamott
#58. Publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is.
Anne Lamott
#59. Sometimes I could not tell you exactly why, especially when it feels pointless and pitiful, like Sisyphus with cash-flow problems. Other
Anne Lamott
#60. What seems true is that something in life, on the highways or in our hearts, is always being installed, or being repaired, or being torn down for the next installation.
Anne Lamott
#61. You have to be grateful whenever you get to someplace safe and okay, even if it turns out it wasn't quite where you were heading.
Anne Lamott
#62. Plot grows out of character. If you focus on who the people in your story are, if you sit and write about two people you are getting to know better every day, something is bound to happen.
Anne Lamott
#63. The truth is that progress is usually small and sneaky.
Anne Lamott
#64. A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way. It's a lie if you make something up. But you make it up in the name of the truth, and then you give your heart to expressing it clearly.
Anne Lamott
#65. Expectations are resentment waiting to happen.
Anne Lamott
#66. To heal, it seems we have to stand in the middle of the horror, at the foot of the cross, and wait out another's suffering where that person can see us. To be honest, that sucks. It's the worst, even if you are the mother of God.
Anne Lamott
#67. To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass.
Anne Lamott
#68. I've seen prayers answered. But often, in my experiences, if you get what you pray for, you've really shortchanged yourself.
Anne Lamott
#69. Additionally, I have spent approximately 1,736 hours of this one precious life waiting for the man to finish and pretending that felt good. And I want a refund.
Anne Lamott
#70. All parents are an embarrassment to their kids. Often, grandparents are the relief. Kids don't have to resist you.
Anne Lamott
#71. But you have to remind yourself that perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor.
Anne Lamott
#72. Shirley Jackson said that a confused reader is an antagonistic reader, and I live by that. It's okay to start anywhere, and to let yourself write a big sloppy overly-detailed first draft. You just jump in, knowing that the water will be cold at first, but no one is making you swim.
Anne Lamott
#73. Now, Muriel Spark is said to have felt that she was taking dictation from God every morning
sitting there, one supposes, plugged into a Dictaphone, typing away, humming. But this is a very hostile and aggressive position. One might hope for bad things to rain down on a person like this.
Anne Lamott
#74. But baseball, if we love it, gives us back our place in the crowd. It restores us.
Anne Lamott
#75. I naively believe that self-love is 80 percent of the solution, that it helps beyond words to take yourself through the day as you would with your most beloved mental-patient relative, with great humor and lots of small treats.
Anne Lamott
#76. 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
#77. Teenagers who do not go to church are adored by God, but they don't get to meet some of the people who love God back.
Anne Lamott
#78. She lived in fear of ifonic endings. (91)
Anne Lamott
#79. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won't have to die.
Anne Lamott
#80. 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
#81. If you fixate on the big picture, the whole shebang, the overview, you miss the stitching.
Anne Lamott
#82. There is nothing you can buy, achieve, own, or rent that can fill up that hunger inside for a sense of fulfillment and wonder.
Anne Lamott
#83. Evangelical Christians and I can sit down and talk one on one about how much we love Jesus, and yet I'm not carried in Christian bookstores.
Anne Lamott
#84. Now she and I sit together in her room and eat chocolate, and I tell her that in a very long time when we both to go heaven, we should try to get chairs next to each other, close to the dessert table.
Anne Lamott
#85. I told myself that historically when people do too well too quickly, they are a Greek tragedy waiting to happen.
Anne Lamott
#86. If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. Otherwise, you'll just be rearranging furniture in rooms you've already been in.
Anne Lamott
#87. My idea of absolute happiness is to be in bed on a rainy day, with my blankie, my cat, and my dog.
Anne Lamott
#88. Certainty is missing the point entirely.
Anne Lamott
#89. Prayer is taking a chance that against all odds and past history, we are loved and chosen, and do not have to get it together before we show up.
Anne Lamott
#90. If the present is really all we have, then the present lasts forever.
Anne Lamott
#91. The reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day. [pp. 65-66]
Anne Lamott
#92. By then I'd figured out the gift of failure, which is that it breaks through all that held breath and isometric tension about needing to look good: it's the gift of feeling floppier.
Anne Lamott
#93. For me, Jesus is my cleft in the rock. He is my safest friend, my safe totally loving accepting big brother.
Anne Lamott
#94. My deepest belief is that to live as if we're dying can set us free. Dying people teach you to pay attention and to forgive and not to sweat the small things.
Anne Lamott
#95. When you're kind to people, and you pay attention, you make a field of comfort around them, and you get it back - the Golden Rule meets the Law of Karma meets Murphy's Law.
Anne Lamott
#96. Sometimes when you need to feel the all-embracing nature of God, paradoxically you need to hang out in the ordinariness, in daily ritual and comfort.
Anne Lamott
#97. When God is going to do something wonderful, He or She always starts with a hardship; when God is going to do something amazing, He or She starts with an impossibility.
Anne Lamott
#98. I read more than other kids; I luxuriated in books. Books were my refuge.
Anne Lamott
#99. Having a baby is like suddenly getting the world's worst roommate.
Anne Lamott
#100. At our most primitive we are storytellers and dancers.
Anne Lamott
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