Anne Lamott is an American novelist and non-fiction writer. She is also a progressive political activist, public speaker, and writing teacher. Profoundly inspirational Anne Lamott quotes will challenge the way you think, and help guide you through any life experience.
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Famous Anne Lamott Quotes
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. Anne Lamott
You will lose someone you can’t live without,and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp. Anne Lamott
My coming to faith did not start with a leap but rather a series of staggers from what seemed like one safe place to another. Like lily pads, round and green, these places summoned and then held me up while I grew. Each prepared me for the next leaf on which I would land, and in this way I moved across the swamp of doubt and fear. Anne Lamott
Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining. Anne Lamott
There is nothing as sweet as a comeback, when you are down and out, about to lose, and out of time. Anne Lamott
For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die. Anne Lamott
Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor. Anne Lamott
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. Anne Lamott
Age has given me the gift of me; it just gave me what I was always longing for, which was to get to be the woman I’ve already dreamt of being. Which is somebody who can do rest and do hard work and be a really constant companion, a constant, tender hearted wife to myself. Anne Lamott
Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. 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. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it. Anne Lamott
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. Anne Lamott
And I felt like my heart had been so thoroughly and irreparably broken that there could be no real joy again, that at best there might eventually be a little contentment. Everyone wanted me to get help and rejoin life, pick up the pieces and move on, and I tried to, I wanted to, but I just had to lie in the mud with my arms wrapped around myself, eyes closed, grieving, until I didn’t have to anymore. Anne Lamott
Pay attention to the beauty surrounding you. Anne Lamott
You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better. Anne Lamott
I don’t want something special. I want something beautifully plain. Anne Lamott
I do not understand the mystery of grace only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us. Anne Lamott
I wish I had thrown out the bathroom scale at age 16. Weighing yourself every morning is like waking up and asking Dick Cheney to validate your sense of inner worth. Anne Lamott
Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It’s like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship. Anne Lamott
My idea of absolute happiness is to be in bed on a rainy day, with my blankie, my cat, and my dog. Anne Lamott
You can either practice being right or practice being kind. Anne Lamott
When hope is not pinned wriggling onto a shiny image or expectation, it sometimes floats forth and opens. Anne Lamott
Not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die. Anne Lamott
I accidentally forgot to graduate from college. Anne Lamott
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
Life is really pretty tricky, and there’s a lot of loss, and the longer you stay alive, the more people you lose whom you actually couldn’t live without. Anne Lamott
I thought such awful thoughts that I cannot even say them out loud because they would make Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish. Anne Lamott
For me, Jesus is my cleft in the rock. He is my safest friend, my safe totally loving accepting big brother. Anne Lamott
You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander. We build this place with the sand of memories; these castles are our memories and inventiveness made tangible. So part of us believes that when the tide starts coming in, we won’t really have lost anything, because actually only a symbol of it was there in the sand. Another part of us thinks we’ll figure out a way to divert the ocean. This is what separates artists from ordinary people the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won’t wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be. Anne Lamott
I was the angriest daughter on earth, and also, one of the most devoted. Anne Lamott
A good marriage is where both people feel like they’re getting the better end of the deal. Anne Lamott
I quit my last real job, as a writer at a magazine, when I was twenty one. That was the moment when I lost my place of prestige on the fast track, and slowly, millimeter by millimeter, I started to get found, to discover who I had been born to be, instead of the impossibly small package, all tied up tightly in myself, that I had agreed to be. Anne Lamott
I don’t remember who said this, but there really are places in the heart you don’t even know exist until you love a child. Anne Lamott
I’ve heard that our greatest cross to carry is ourselves how gravely we fall short. Anne Lamott
Hope is not about proving anything. It’s about choosing to believe this one thing, that love is bigger than any grim, bleak shit anyone can throw at us. Anne Lamott
The reason I never give up hope is because everything is so basically hopeless. Anne Lamott
You can get the monkey off your back, but the circus never leaves town. Anne Lamott
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
Clutter and mess show us that life is being lived. Tidiness makes me think of held breath, of suspended animation. Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist’s true friend. What people somehow forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here. Anne Lamott
It was simple reality most competitive tennis players in my day were privileged, spoiled, entitled and white. Also, many of them were beautiful, fit, tan and of good stock great big hair and white teeth and long legs. Then there were the rest of us. Anne Lamott
It’s good to do uncomfortable things. It’s weight training for life. Anne Lamott
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
It’s funny I always imagined when I was a kid that adults had some kind of inner toolbox full of shiny tools the saw of discernment, the hammer of wisdom, the sandpaper of patience. But then when I grew up I found that life handed you these rusty bent old tools friendships, prayer, conscience, honesty and said do the best you can with these, they will have to do. And mostly, against all odds, they do. Anne Lamott
I do not have deep theological understanding or opinion, but I do not read the Bible as the literal word of God. Anne Lamott
I have a lot of faith. But I am also afraid a lot, and have no real certainty about anything. I remembered something Father Tom had told me that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns. Anne Lamott
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
I think joy and sweetness and affection are a spiritual path. We’re here to know God, to love and serve God, and to be blown away by the beauty and miracle of nature. You just have to get rid of so much baggage to be light enough to dance, to sing, to play. You don’t have time to carry grudges; you don’t have time to cling to the need to be right. Anne Lamott
The opposite of faith is not doubt: It is certainty. It is madness. You can tell you have created God in your own image when it turns out that he or she hates all the same people you do. Anne Lamott
If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act truth is always subversive. Anne Lamott
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
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
I’ve heard people say that God is the gift of desperation, and there’s a lot to be said for having really reached a bottom where you’ve run out of any more good ideas or plans for everybody else’s behavior; or how to save and fix and rescue; or just get out of a huge mess, possibly of your own creation. Anne Lamott
Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report written on birds that he’d had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books about birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird. Anne Lamott
The worst part about celebrating another birthday is the shock that you’re only as well as you are. Anne Lamott
Forgiveness means it finally becomes unimportant that you hit back. You’re done. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you want to have lunch with the person. If you keep hitting back, you stay trapped in the nightmare. Anne Lamott
It’s a great time to be alive. Anne Lamott
Part of me loves and respects men so desperately, and part of me thinks they are so embarrassingly incompetent at life and in love. You have to teach them the very basics of emotional literacy. You have to teach them how to be there for you, and part of me feels tender toward them and gentle, and part of me is so afraid of them, afraid of any more violation. Anne Lamott
Your experiences will be yours alone. But truth and best friendship will rarely if ever disappoint you. Anne Lamott
Expectations are resentments under construction. Anne Lamott
Sometimes I think God loves the ones who most desperately ache and are most desperately lost his or her wildest, most messed up children the way you’d ache and love a screwed up rebel daughter in juvenile hall. Anne Lamott
My mind is a neighborhood I try not to go into alone. Anne Lamott
I love readings and my readers, but the din of voices of the audience gives me stage fright, and the din of voices inside whisper that I am a fraud, and that the jig is up. Surely someone will rise up from the audience and say out loud that not only am I not funny and helpful, but I’m annoying, and a phony. Anne Lamott
It turned out this man worked for the Dalai Lama. And she said gently that they believe when a lot of things start going wrong all at once, it is to protect something big and lovely that is trying to get itself born and that this something needs for you to be distracted so that it can be born as perfectly as possible. Anne Lamott
I got a lot of things that society had promised would make me whole and fulfilled all the things that the culture tells you from preschool on will quiet the throbbing anxiety inside you stature, the respect of colleagues, maybe even a kind of low grade fame. Anne Lamott
Remember that you own what happened to you. If your childhood was less than ideal, you may have been raised thinking that if you told the truth about what really went on in your family, a long bony white finger would emerge from a cloud and point to you, while a chilling voice thundered, We told you not to tell. But that was then. Just put down on paper everything you can remember now about your parents and siblings and relatives and neighbors, and we will deal with libel later on. Anne Lamott
Alice Adams wrote a sweet note to me after my first novel came out when I was 26, and I was so blown away that I sent her a bunch of stamps by return mail. I have no idea what I was thinking. It was a star struck impulse. Anne Lamott
Because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be? Anne Lamott
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. Anne Lamott
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
No one tells you that your life is effectively over when you have a child that you’re never going to draw another complacent breath again or that whatever level of hypochondria and rage you’d learned to repress and live with is going to seem like the good old days. Anne Lamott
Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don’t drop kick a puppy into the neighbor’s yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper. Anne Lamott
A whole lot of us believers, of all different religions, are ready to turn back the tide of madness by walking together, in both the dark and the light in other words, through life registering voters as we go, and keeping the faith. Anne Lamott
But you can’t get to any of these truths by sitting in a field smiling beatifically, avoiding your anger and damage and grief. Your anger and damage and grief are the way to the truth. We don’t have much truth to express unless we have gone into those rooms and closets and woods and abysses that we were told not go in to. When we have gone in and looked around for a long while, just breathing and finally taking it in then we will be able to speak in our own voice and to stay in the present moment. And that moment is home. Anne Lamott
No one is more sentimentalized in America than mothers on Mother’s Day, but no one is more often blamed for the culture’s bad people and behavior. Anne Lamott
The difference between you and God is that God doesn’t think He’s you. Anne Lamott
The first holy truth in God 101 is that men and women of true faith have always had to accept the mystery of God’s identity and love and ways. I hate that, but it’s the truth. Anne Lamott
As a Christian and a feminist, the most important message I can carry and fight for is the sacredness of each human life, and reproductive rights for all women are a crucial part of that. It is a moral necessity that we not be forced to bring children into the world for whom we cannot be responsible and adoring and present. We must not inflict life on children who will be resented; we must not inflict unwanted children on society. Anne Lamott
Being on a book tour is like being on the seesaw when you’re a little kid. The excitement is in having someone to play with, and in rising up in the air, but then you’re at the mercy of those holding you down, and if it’s your older brother, or Paul Wolfowitz, they leap up, so that you crash down and get hurt. Anne Lamott
Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you’re conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader. He or she will recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of. Anne Lamott
I’m kind of a gossip hound, but watching the media whip the small fires into giant forest fires so that they can cover the result is infuriating. Anne Lamott
My heart was broken and my head was just barely inhabitable. Anne Lamott
If the present is really all we have, then the present lasts forever. Anne Lamott
