Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by Anne Lamott, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring Anne Lamott quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 762 Anne Lamott quotes for you to read and share.
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
You fall so deeply in love with your grandbaby. It's so so so much easier than being a parent, because you really don't have much responsibility. And just when you are at the end of your rope with exhaustion, the parents take the baby away. So it's the best of both worlds. -- Anne Lamott
Good therapy helps. Good friends help. Pretending that we are doing better than we are doesn't. Shame doesn't. Being heard does. -- Anne Lamott
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
good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep -- Anne Lamott
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
I know nothing, except what everyone knows
if there when grace dances, I should dance. -- Anne Lamott
I was usually filled with a sense of something like shame until I'd remember that wonderful line of Blake's- that we are here to learn to endure the beams of love- and I would take a long deep breath and force these words out of my strangulated throat: Thank you. -- 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
My idea of everything going smoothly on an airplane is (a) that I not die in a slow-motion fiery crash or get stabbed to death by terrorists and (b) that none of the other passengers try to talk to me. All conversation should end at the moment the wheels leave the ground. -- Anne Lamott
I am the woman I grew to be partly in spite of my mother, and partly because of the extraordinary love of her best friends, and my own best friends' mothers, and from surrogates, many of whom were not women at all but gay men. I have loved them my entire life, even after their passing. -- Anne Lamott
Easter says that love is more powerful than death, bigger than the dark, bigger than cancer, bigger even than airport security lines. -- Anne Lamott
When we agree to being part of something bigger than our own wired, fixated minds, we are saved. -- Anne Lamott
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
I know God enjoys hearing my take on how best we should all proceed, as I'm always full of useful advice. I'm sure God says either, "Oh, I so love Annie's selfless and evolved thoughts," or else "Jeez. What a head case. -- Anne Lamott
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
Laughter is deliverance, bubbly salvation. -- Anne Lamott
Kids are hard -they drive you crazy and break your heart- whereas grandchildren make you feel great about life, and yourself, and your ability to love someone unconditionally, finally, after all these years. -- Anne Lamott
Most of me was glad when my mother died. She was a handful, but not in a cute, festive way. More in a life-threatening way, that had caused me a long time ago to give up all hope of ever feeling good about having had her as a mother. -- Anne Lamott
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
Is it okay to be a tiny tiny bit tired of Caitlyn? Yes, was very brave but so far he's gone from man to mannequin, instead of man to woman. -- Anne Lamott
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
Periods in the wilderness or desert were not lost time. You might find life, wildflowers, fossils, sources of water. I wish there were shortcuts to wisdom and self-knowledge: cuter abysses or three-day spa wilderness experiences. Sadly, it doesn't work that way. I so resent this. -- Anne Lamott
I like to read away as much of the afternoon as possible, until real life rears its ugly head. -- Anne Lamott
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
I want people who write to crash or dive below the surface, where life is so cold and confusing and hard to see.
Your anger and damage and grief are the way to the truth. -- Anne Lamott
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
This kind of beauty softens you and expands you, which is good, but of course it makes you vulnerable to all sorts of horrible things, like, oh, feelings. And being in your body. -- Anne Lamott
All these people keep waxing sentimental about how fabulously well I am doing as a mother, how competent I am, but I feel inside like when you're first learning to put nail polish on your right hand with your left. You can do it, but it doesn't look all that great around the cuticles. -- Anne Lamott
You want to protect your child from pain, and what you get instead is life, and grace; and though theologians insist that grace is freely given, the truth is that sometimes you pay for it through the nose. And you can't pay your child's way. -- Anne Lamott
[W]hen you're dreaming, you're not the one calling the shots. So it's a reprieve. -- Anne Lamott
Look back on your life and find something small that made a big difference. -- Anne Lamott
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
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
Start with your childhood, I tell them. Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can. -- Anne Lamott
You are going to feel like hell if you never write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves in your heart
your stories, visions, memories, songs: your truth, your version of things, in your voice. That is really all you have to offer us, and it's why you were born. -- Anne Lamott
I became a Christian before I got sober. So I was a drunk, bulimic Christian. -- Anne Lamott
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
I rest in silence and music and long strides, while Sam rests in noise and motion. -- 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
This family business can be so stressful - difficult, damaged people showing up t spend time with other difficult, damanged people -- 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
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
There are these people who keep taking you in and feeding you and loving you and making the world a tiny bit safer than it feels. People have community and family, but existentially we are deeply isolated. -- Anne Lamott
I woke up full of hate and fear the day before the most recent peace march in San Francisco. This was disappointing: I'd hoped to wake up feeling somewhere between Virginia Woolf and Wavy Gravy. -- Anne Lamott
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
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
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
The three things I cannot change are the past, the truth, and you. -- Anne Lamott
For me, being a writer is not an altered state. It's very ponderous, and very - it's like being a shoemaker. -- Anne Lamott
I don't have very sophisticated taste in music. I listen to a lot of folk music. I like reggae. -- Anne Lamott
During Advent, we have to sit in our own anxiety and funkiness long enough to know what a Promised Land would be like, or, to put it another way, what it means to be saved
which, if we are to believe Jesus or Gandhi, specifically means to see everyone on earth as family. -- Anne Lamott
Do you think that we're wired this way? With the devil inside?" "Yeah, in the same way we're wired for God. But not to the same extent. -- Anne Lamott
I've given guys blow jobs just because I've run out of things to talk about.'
Oh, Rae. Who hasn't -- Anne Lamott
I like the desert for short periods of time, from inside a car, with the windows rolled up, and the doors locked. I prefer beach resorts with room service. -- Anne Lamott
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
It's always the same old problem: how to find ourselves in the great yammering of ego and tragedy and discomfort and obsession with everyone else's destinies. -- Anne Lamott
San Quentin's is the safest beach in the world. We're not talking about lifeguards here who might yell at someone who's being rude-we're talking about armed guards, in watchtowers, two blocks away. -- Anne Lamott
What if Sam's heart got broken again? As with most kids who are fourteen, it has been spackled and duct-taped and caulked back together many times as it is. [p. 258] -- Anne Lamott
She lived in fear of ifonic endings. -- Anne Lamott
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
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
Nah. But on the first day of class, when I saw that guy nailed to the plus sign, I knew these people weren't fooling around.' " Lank -- Anne Lamott
I can tell you that what you're looking for is already inside you. -- Anne Lamott
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
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
A priest friend of mine has cautioned me away from the standard God of our childhoods, who loves you and guides you and then, if you are bad, roasts you: God as a high school principal in a gray suit who never remembered your name but is always leafing unhappily through your files. -- 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
There may be a Nurse Ratched-like listing of things that must be done right this moment: foods that must come out of the freezer, appointments that must be canceled or made, hairs that must be tweezed. But you hold an imaginary gun to your head and make yourself stay at the desk. -- Anne Lamott
Laughter is the key that grace has arrived. -- Anne Lamott
It's funny where we look for salvation, and where we actually find it. -- Anne Lamott
Radical self-care is what we've been longing for, desperate for, our entire lives-friendship with our own hearts. -- Anne Lamott
Usually with life, you start wherever you are, and you flail around for a while
-- Anne Lamott
So a moral position is not a message. A moral position is a passionate caring inside you. -- Anne Lamott
These are the words I want on my gravestone: that I was a helper, and that I danced.
-- Anne Lamott
God has smiled on me, He has set me free. For us to acknowledge that we have been set free from toxic dependency, from crippling obsession or guilt, that we have been graced with the ability finally to forgive someone, is just plain astonishing. -- 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
Everything takes me forever. It's all lurch, flail. I hope that is good news to you writers. -- Anne Lamott
Pets are the world to me. I think they are the most obvious manifestations of divine love that we are going to see this side of eternity. -- Anne Lamott
Hope is not logical. It always comes as a surprise, just when you think all hope is lost. Hope is the cousin to grief, and both take time: you can't short-circuit grief, or emptiness, and you can't patch it up with your bicycle tire tube kit. You have to take the next right action. -- Anne Lamott
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
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
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
And as it turns out, if one person is praying for you, buckle up. Things can happen. -- Anne Lamott
My mother was a not-too-devoted atheist. She went to Episcopal church on Christmas Eve every year, and that was mostly it. -- Anne Lamott
The reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day. [pp. 65-66] -- Anne Lamott
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
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
I suddenly have two stomachs - a regular tummy and another one below that, which I call the subcontinent. This older body is both amazingly healthy and a big disappointment. -- Anne Lamott
I told myself that historically when people do too well too quickly, they are a Greek tragedy waiting to happen. -- Anne Lamott
I'm very sad about Mitch McConnell probably getting to be Senate majority leader, if only for two years. To me, he is just everything that is wrong with the world, a bullying obstructionist blowhard liar (not to put too fine a point on it). -- Anne Lamott
I took notes on the people around me, in my town, in my family, in my memory. I took notes on my own state of mind, my grandiosity, the low self-esteem. I wrote down the funny stuff I overheard. I learned to be like a ship's rat, veined ears trembling, and I learned to scribble it all down. -- Anne Lamott
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
This is a very violent place to live, the Earth, and we're a very violent species. Cain is still killing Abel. We see that every day. -- Anne Lamott
I don't have any romantic views of parenting. Every step of the way it's really hard. It's a dangerous world, physically and psychologically. -- Anne Lamott
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
I believe in listening to what calls you from your heart and your spirit and if you do it badly, like learning to dance, you do it badly or you're going to kick yourself when you grow old and you meant to do it. -- Anne Lamott
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
That's what's so touching about weddings: Two people fall in love, and decide to see if their love might stand up over time, if there might be enough grace and forgiveness and memory lapses to help the whole shebang hang together. -- Anne Lamott
What an incredible drug fear is. -- Anne Lamott
I'm not going to change the way people think about me, but I can say you know what? I'm not going to carry that in my backpack. -- Anne Lamott
A sober friend from Texas said once that the three things I cannot change are the past, the truth, and you. I hate this insight so much. -- Anne Lamott
Almost every single thing you hope publication will do for you is a fantasy, a hologram
it's the eagle on your credit card that only seems to soar. -- Anne Lamott
The pain does grow less acute, but the insidious palace lie that we will get over crushing losses means that our emotional GPS can never find true north, as it is based on maps that no longer mention the most important places we have been to. -- Anne Lamott
The single most radical thing I know ... is that I get to take care of myself. -- Anne Lamott
Lighthouses don't go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining. -- Anne Lamott
I've spent my whole life trying to get over having had Nikki for a mother, and I have to say that from day one after she died, I liked having a dead mother much more than having an impossible one. [p. 47] -- Anne Lamott
Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns. Faith also means reaching deeply within, for the sense one was born with, the sense, for example, to go for a walk. -- Anne Lamott
Sometimes grace works like water wings when you feel you are sinking. -- Anne Lamott
My family tends to be pretty alcoholic and drug-addicted. -- Anne Lamott
The road to enlightenment is long and difficult, and you should try not to forget snacks and magazines. -- Anne Lamott
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
I read more than other kids; I luxuriated in books. Books were my refuge. -- Anne Lamott
If you fixate on the big picture, the whole shebang, the overview, you miss the stitching. -- Anne Lamott
Most marriages are a mess, and the children get caught between two bitter, antagonistic parents. My parents stayed married for 27 unhappy years, till their kids were grown, and this was a catastrophe for us. -- Anne Lamott
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
For me, Jesus is my cleft in the rock. He is my safest friend, my safe totally loving accepting big brother. -- Anne Lamott
Being a writer guarantees that you will spend too much time alone -- and that as a result, your mind will begin to warp. -- Anne Lamott
I spend most of my time alone, because I so value and thrive in the quiet. Heaven. -- Anne Lamott
I was learning the secrets of life: that you could become the woman you'd dared to dream of being, but to do so you were going to have to fall in love with your own crazy, ruined self. -- Anne Lamott
Every time I see the bumper sticker that says "We think we're humans having spiritual experiences, but we're really spirits having human experiences," I (a) think it's true and (b) want to ram the car. -- Anne Lamott
Gravity and sadness yank us down, and hope gives us a nudge to help one another get back up or to sit with the fallen on the ground, in the abyss, in solidarity. -- Anne Lamott
Grief, as I read somewhere once, is a lazy Susan. One day it is heavy and underwater, and the next day it spins and stops at loud and rageful, and the next day at wounded keening, and the next day at numbness, silence. -- Anne Lamott
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
I understood that the man I was calling for could never ever come back. Because I understood that the man that I was calling for was dead. -- Anne Lamott
Laughter is a bubbly, effervescent form of holiness -- Anne Lamott
Sometimes it feels like God has reached down and touched me, blessed me a thousand times over, and sometimes it all feels like a mean joke, like God's advisers are Muammar Qaddafi and Phyllis Schlafly. -- Anne Lamott
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
I went to Goucher College in Maryland for the best possible reasons - to learn - but then I dropped out at 19 for the best possible reasons - to become a writer. -- Anne Lamott
I went to church with my grandparents sometimes and I loved it. -- Anne Lamott
My mother's eyes were large and brown, like my son's, but unlike Sam's, they were always frantic, like a hummingbird who can't quite find the flower but keeps jabbing around. -- Anne Lamott
My natural tendency is to complicate everything
and then to spray words and ideas onto everything afterwards. I've had to develop the habit of keeping things simple. -- Anne Lamott
You lose the known package of your nice organized self almost instantly here. Overeating is one way back, the way it is at funerals at home. -- Anne Lamott
I'm human, you're human, let me greet your humanness. Let's be people together for a while. -- Anne Lamott
I learned that God was an equal opportunity employer - that it was possible to experience the divine anywhere you were, anywhere you could see the sun and moon rise or set, or burn through the fog. -- 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
Will call him a she when the pee-pee is gone. Says Brave is to endure stares, jeers, prejudice. He won't. -- Anne Lamott
We aren't a drop in the ocean, but are the ocean, in drops. -- Anne Lamott
We all know we're going to die; what's important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this. -- Anne Lamott
Human lives are hard, even those of health and privilege, and don't make much sense. This is the message of the Book of Job: Any snappy explanation of suffering you come up with will be horseshit. -- Anne Lamott
If you want to change the way you feel about people, you have to change the way you treat them. -- Anne Lamott
So I pray for people who are hurting, that they be filled with air and light. Air and light heal; they somehow get into those dark, musty places, like spiritual antibiotics. We don't have to figure out how this all works - "Figure it out" is not a good slogan. It's enough to know it does. -- Anne Lamott
I'd wanted to be a writer my whole life. But when I finally made it, I felt like a greyhound catching the mechanical rabbit she'd been chasing for so long
discovering it was merely metal, wrapped in cloth. It wasn't alive; it had no spirit. It was fake. -- Anne Lamott
If God was giving me a ham, I'd be crazy not to receive it. Maybe it was the ham of God, who takes away the sins of the world. -- Anne Lamott
... good dialogue encompasses both what is said and what is not said. -- Anne Lamott
When everything starts going wrong all at once, it is to protect something big and lovely that is trying to get itself born. -- Anne Lamott
Perfection is shallow, unreal, and fatally uninteresting. -- Anne Lamott
If you are a writer, or want to be a writer, this is how you spend your days
listening, observing, storing things away, making your isolation pay off. You take home all you've taken in, all that you've overheard, and you turn it into gold. (Or at least you try.) -- Anne Lamott
Help for the sick and hungry,
home for the homeless folk,
peace in the world forever,
this is my prayer, O Lord. Amen. -- Anne Lamott
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
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
Lies cannot nourish or protect you. Only freedom from fear, freedom from lies, can make us beautiful, and keep us safe. -- Anne Lamott
They seemed to read all the papers the school sent home, which I think is actually a little show-offy. -- Anne Lamott
I have a very dark sense of humor. I swear. I have a very playful relationship with Jesus. -- Anne Lamott
I know that sometimes these friends feel that they have been expelled from the ordinary world they lived in before and that they are now citizens of the Land of the Fucked. -- Anne Lamott
What can we say beyond Wow, in the presence of glorious art, in music so magnificent that it can't have originated solely on this side of things? Wonder takes our breath away, and makes room for new breath. -- Anne Lamott
I've always thought I could use my brain and my heart to jockey everyone around to the good. But life is not jockeyable. When you try, you make people infinitely crazier than they already were, including or especially yourself. -- Anne Lamott
Beauty is a miracle of things going together imperfectly. -- Anne Lamott
Presents can make up for some of the disappointments that life doles out, such as it makes almost no sense and is coming to an end more quickly than ever. -- 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
Once an old woman at my church said the secret is that God loves us exactly the way we are and that he loves us too much to let us stay like this, and I'm just trying to trust that. -- Anne Lamott
Churches are good for prayer, but so are garages and cars and mountains and showers and dance floors. -- Anne Lamott
I just try to love and serve everyone, and bring everyone water, and lend an ear; that's what Jesus said to do. -- Anne Lamott
Mark Twain said that Adam was the only man who, when he said a good thing, knew that nobody had said it before. -- Anne Lamott
For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous.
In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write
really, really shitty first drafts. -- 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
Perfectionism will ruin your writing, blocking inventiveness and playfulness and life force -- Anne Lamott
Perfectionism means that you try not to leave so much mess to clean up. But clutter and mess show us that life is being lived. -- Anne Lamott
Feeding a baby is like filling a hole with putty - you get it in and then you sort of shave off all the excess around the hole and get it back in, like you're spackling. -- Anne Lamott
Life is not a submarine. -- Anne Lamott
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
If you find that you start a number of stories or pieces that you don't ever bother finishing, that you lose interest or faith in them along the way, it may be that there is nothing at their center about which you care passionately. -- Anne Lamott
The truth is that your spirits don't rise until you get way down. -- Anne Lamott
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
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
After a while the middle-aged person who lives in her head begins to talk to her soul, the kid. -- Anne Lamott
One thing I know for sure about raising children is that every single day a kid needs discipline ... But also every single day a kid needs a break. -- Anne Lamott
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
We said that we believed that the truth would set us free, and the truth was that the Sunday-school staff was burned out, that there were almost no people of color, and that if we didn't get more help, we'd have to close down. -- Anne Lamott
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
One writer I know tells me that he sits down every morning and says to himself nicely, It's not like you don't have a choice, because you do
you can either type or kill yourself. -- Anne Lamott
Sam said to me the other day, "I love you like 20 tyrannosauruses on 20 mountaintops," and this is the exact same way in which I love him. -- Anne Lamott
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
You simply keep putting down one damn word after the other, as you hear them, as they come to you. You can either set brick as a laborer or as an artist. -- Anne Lamott
But baseball, if we love it, gives us back our place in the crowd. It restores us. -- Anne Lamott
I'll live as well, as deeply, as madly as I can
until I die. -- Anne Lamott
A hundred years from now?
All new people. -- Anne Lamott
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
The thing about light is that it really isn't yours; it's what you gather and shine back. And it gets more power from reflectiveness; if you sit still and take it in, it fills your cup, and then you can give it off yourself. -- Anne Lamott
They kind of want to write, but they really want to be published. You'll never get to where you want to be that way, I tell them. -- 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
What fills us is real, sweet, dopey, funny life. -- 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
We're often ashamed of asking for so much help because it seems selfish or petty or narcissistic, but I think, if there's a God - and I believe there is - that God is there to help. That's what God's job is. -- Anne Lamott
I kept asking God for help, and after a while I realized something
that Josh was not enjoying this either. He was just trying to take care of himself, and I made the radical decision to let him off the hook. -- Anne Lamott
When I was young, I used to be so jealous of other girls that it crippled me. -- Anne Lamott
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
Believing in George Bush was so ludicrous that believing in God almost seems rational. -- Anne Lamott
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
Jesus is busy with his own stuff, and is not going to get involved in your little tug-of-war. Plus, don't forget, he has his own mother to deal with. She's all he can handle, as far as mothers go. -- Anne Lamott
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
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
Every sound is by definition a stop, which is how we can hear it. -- Anne Lamott
His art springs out of bubbling underground necessity, as if he's somehow dipping himself into the river that gave him life; he's making dream material visible. -- Anne Lamott
We stitch together quilts of meaning to keep us warm and safe, with whatever patches of beauty and utility we have on hand. -- Anne Lamott
The whistle is always waiting to be blown, and in some ways, it gets me to do better work. -- Anne Lamott
The American way is to not need help, but to help. -- Anne Lamott
After a few days at the desk, telling the truth in an interesting way turns out to be as easy and pleasurable as bathing a cat. -- Anne Lamott
telling the truth in an interesting way turns out to be about as easy and pleasurable as bathing a cat. Some -- Anne Lamott
It is a violation of trust to use your kids as caulking for the cracks in you. -- Anne Lamott
Had to learn to be present without paying quite so much attention to my poor old overamped mind, because this was the source of most of my unhappiness. And it still is. The -- Anne Lamott
Grace means you're in a different universe from where you had been stuck, when you had absolutely no way to get there on your own. -- Anne Lamott
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
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
First find a path, and a little light to see by. Then push up your sleeves and start helping. -- Anne Lamott
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
There are few experiences as depressing as that anxious barren state known as writer's block, where you sit staring at your blank page like a cadaver, feeling your mind congeal, feeling you talent run down your leg and into your sock. -- Anne Lamott
Alone, we are doomed, but by the same token, we've learned that people are impossible, even the ones we love most - especially the ones we love most: they're damaged, prickly and set in their ways. -- Anne Lamott
My understanding of incarnation is that we are not served by getting away from the grubbiness of suffering. Sometimes we feel that we are barely pulling ourselves forward through a tight tunnel on badly scraped-up elbows. But we do come out the other side, exhausted and changed. -- Anne Lamott
Maybe, I thought, after a few months of sobriety, you could successfully smoke marijuana again, or maybe every anniversary you got to have one glass of a perfectly chilled California Chardonnay. -- Anne Lamott
To be born into this world exactly the way it is, into these exact circumstances, even if that meant not having a dad or an ozone layer, even if it included pets that would die and acne and seventh=grade dances and AIDS. -- Anne Lamott
Sometimes I could not tell you exactly why, especially when it feels pointless and pitiful, like Sisyphus with cash-flow problems. Other -- Anne Lamott
Sometimes Heaven is just a new pair of glasses. -- Anne Lamott
I love silence. I seek and create it at every opportunity. I need it to work. -- Anne Lamott
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
At our most primitive we are storytellers and dancers. -- Anne Lamott
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
But you don't always get what you want;,you get what you get -- Anne Lamott
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
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
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
She lived in fear of ifonic endings. (91) -- Anne Lamott
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
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
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
But you have to remind yourself that perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor. -- Anne Lamott
All parents are an embarrassment to their kids. Often, grandparents are the relief. Kids don't have to resist you. -- Anne Lamott
I've seen prayers answered. But often, in my experiences, if you get what you pray for, you've really shortchanged yourself. -- Anne Lamott
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
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
Expectations are resentment waiting to happen. -- Anne Lamott
The truth is that progress is usually small and sneaky. -- 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
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
Where do we even start on the daily walk of restoration and awakening? We start where we are. -- Anne Lamott
People help you or you help them and when we offer or receive help, we take in each other. And then we are saved. -- Anne Lamott
I never had a particularly strong craving to procreate, except for earlier fantasies of wanting to be Marmee in Little Women. -- Anne Lamott
You need to find people who laugh gently at themselves, who remind you gently to lighten up. -- Anne Lamott
Gratitude is peace. -- Anne Lamott
All freedom comes from discipline. -- Anne Lamott
Having a baby is like suddenly getting the world's worst roommate. -- Anne Lamott
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
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
If the present is really all we have, then the present lasts forever. -- Anne Lamott
Certainty is missing the point entirely. -- 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
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
Nothing is as important as a likable narrator. Nothing holds a story together better. -- Anne Lamott
Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you. -- Anne Lamott
You should not bring more items and hurdles to the obstacle course. -- Anne Lamott
If you have a problem you can solve by throwing money at it, you don't have a very interesting problem. -- Anne Lamott
One line of dialogue that rings true reveals character in a way that pages of description can't. -- Anne Lamott
How alive am I willing to be? -- 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
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
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
Publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is. -- Anne Lamott
Write as if your parents are dead. -- Anne Lamott
Mattie was in love with Daniel, of course; this was the X within the circle on her map: I love Daniel. -- Anne Lamott
All that is holding us together [is] stories and compassion. -- Anne Lamott
He is a writer. He makes the rest of them nervous. -- Anne Lamott
How do you begin? The answer is simple: you decide to. -- Anne Lamott
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
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
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
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
You don't always have to chop with the sword of truth. You can point with it too. -- Anne Lamott
I naturally prefer the company of people who hold grudges, as long as they are not held against me. -- Anne Lamott
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
There is nothing as sweet as a comeback, when you are down and out, about to lose, and out of time. -- Anne Lamott
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
Whenever the world throws rose petals at you, which thrill and seduce the ego, beware. -- Anne Lamott
Grief ends up giving you the two best things: softness and illumination. -- 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
Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers. -- Anne Lamott
I do know the sorrow of being ordinary, and that much of our life is spent doing the crazy mental arithmetic of how, at any given moment, we might improve, or at least disguise or present our defects and screw-ups in either more charming or more intimidating ways. -- 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
Sometimes grace is a ribbon of mountain air that gets in through the cracks. -- Anne Lamott
What a mess we are, I thought. But this is usually where any hope of improvement begins, acknowledging the mess. When I am well, I know not to mess with mess right away; I try to let silence and time work their magic. [p. 100] -- Anne Lamott
Writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little. -- Anne Lamott
There was going to be a spot for me in this joint, the earth, after all. It was never going to be a great match for someone as bright and strange as me, but books were going to make it survivable. -- Anne Lamott
Laughter is carbonated holiness. -- Anne Lamott
Radical self-care is quantum, and radiates out into the atmosphere, like a little fresh air. It is a huge gift to the world. When people respond by saying, "Well, isn't she full of herself," smile obliquely, like Mona Lisa, and make both of you a nice cup of tea. -- Anne Lamott
Yet union with a partner - someone with whom to wake, whom you love, and talk with on and off all day, and sit with at dinner, and watch TV and movies with, and read together in bed with, and do hard tasks with, and are loved by. That sounds really lovely. -- Anne Lamott
Joy is the best makeup. But a little lipstick is a close runner-up. -- Anne Lamott
He told me about his monster. His sounded just like mine without quite so much mascara. When people shine a little light on their monster, we find out how similar most of our monsters are. -- Anne Lamott
Getting found almost always means being lost for a while. -- Anne Lamott
My mind kept thinking its harsh thinky thoughts, but I would distract myself from them gently and say, 'Those are not the truth, those are not trustworthy, those are for entertainment purposes only.' Eventually I had quieter thoughts. -- Anne Lamott
I am an Aries. Although I do not believe in astrology, I think this is exactly the right sign to have been born under. -- Anne Lamott
I mean "God" as shorthand for the Good, for the animating energy of love; for Life, for the light that radiates from within people and from above; in the energies of nature, even in our rough, messy selves. -- Anne Lamott
Love falls to earth, rises from the ground, pools around the afflicted. Love pulls people back to their feet. Bodies and souls are fed. Bones and lives heal. New blades of grass grow from charred soil. The sun rises. -- Anne Lamott
He lost the great big outward thing, the good- looking package, and the real parts endured. They shine through like crazy, the brillian mind and humor, the depth of generosity, the intense blue yes, those beautiful hands. -- Anne Lamott
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
My friend Terry says that when you need to make a decision, in your work or otherwise, and you don't know what to do, just do one thing or the other, because the worst that can happen is that you will have made a terrible mistake. -- Anne Lamott
Mothering has been the richest experience of my life, but I am still opposed to Mother's Day. It perpetuates the dangerous idea that all parents are somehow superior to non-parents. -- Anne Lamott
I find most famous Christians to be full of themselves and of prejudice and self-loathing, masquerading as devout religious belief. I find all fundamentalism to be terrifying and very destructive. -- Anne Lamott
One of the gifts of being a writer is that it gives you an excuse to do things, to go places and explore. Another is that writing motivates you to look closely at life, at life as it lurches by and tramps around. -- Anne Lamott
Grief is just so scary ... If we finally begin to cry all those suppressed tears, they will surely wash us away like the Mississippi River. That's what our parents told us. We got sent to our rooms for having huge feelings. In my family, if you cried or got angry, you didn't get dinner. -- Anne Lamott
E-books are great for instant gratification - you see a review somewhere of a book that interests you, and you can start reading it five minutes later. -- Anne Lamott
I believe that discipline and self-love are the total secrets to freedom. -- Anne Lamott
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
Jesus was soft on crime. He'd never have been elected anything. -- Anne Lamott
I wish grace and healing were more abracadabra kind of things. Also, that delicate silver bells would ring to announce grace's arrival. But no, it's clog and slog and scootch, on the floor, in the silence, in the dark. -- Anne Lamott
Expectations are resentments under construction. -- 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
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
Try to write in a directly emotional way, instead of being too subtle or oblique. Don't be afraid of your material or your past. Be afraid of wasting any more time obsessing about how you look and how people see you. Be afraid of not getting your writing done. -- Anne Lamott
The miracle is that we are here, that no matter how undone we've been the night before, we wake up every morning and are still here. It is phenomenal just to be. -- Anne Lamott
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
I'm pretty sure that it is only by experiencing that ocean of sadness in a naked and immediate way that we come to be healed
which is to say, that we come to experience life with a real sense of presence and spaciousness and peace. -- Anne Lamott
A nun I know once told me she kept begging God to take her character defects away from her. After years of this prayer, God finally got back to her: I'm not going to take anything away from you, you have to give it to Me. -- Anne Lamott
I kept my expectations low, which is one of the secrets of life. -- Anne Lamott
I just gave up one day. Around the time the news about toxic shock came out. I thought, Fuck me, man, I give up. Come and get me. -- Anne Lamott
I think we're all pretty crazy on this bus. I'm not sure I know anyone who's got all the dots on his or her dice. -- Anne Lamott
Because when people have seen you at their worst, you don't have to put on the mask as much. -- 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
Some people seem to understand this - that life and change take time - but I am not one of those people. -- Anne Lamott
But easy's like, who cares? Easy's like, how much is easy going to get you? -- Anne Lamott
I love ritual and repetition. Without them, I would be a balloon with a slow leak. -- Anne Lamott
You can change the world with a hot bath, if you sink into it from a place of knowing that you are worth profound care, even when you're dirty and rattled. -- Anne Lamott
Writing takes a combination of sophistication and innocence; it takes conscience, our belief that something is beautiful because it is right. -- Anne Lamott
I could become like that dyslexic agnostic in the old joke - the one who lies in bed and tries to figure out if his dog exists. -- Anne Lamott
The Giants are usually described as rag tag, kind of a great garage sale team, and the Democrats are described as the Mommies to the Republican Daddies; and everyone hates the mommies, but wait, wait - I didn't intend to get into the pathos and thrill of being a Democratic Giants fan. -- Anne Lamott
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
I learned that opening myself to my own love and to life's tough loveliness not only was the most delicious, amazing thing on earth but also was quantum. It would radiate out to a cold, hungry world. Beautiful moments heal, as do real cocoa, Pete Seeger, a walk on old fire roads. -- Anne Lamott
Children should not have treacherous diseases or be afraid. This should be one rule we all agree on. -- Anne Lamott
This is the Easter message, that awakening is possible, to the goodness of God, the sacredness of human life, the sisterhood and brotherhood of all. -- 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
One rarely knows where to begin the search for meaning, though by necessity, we can only start where we are. -- Anne Lamott
If you want to know how God feels about money, look at whom she gives it to. -- Anne Lamott
Does sunset sometimes look like the sun is coming up? Do you know what a faithful love is like? You're crying; you say you've burned yourself. But can you think of anyone who's not hazy with smoke? - Rumi -- Anne Lamott
We're individuals in time and space who are often gravely lost, and then miraculously, in art, found. -- Anne Lamott
This is who I want to be in the world. This is who I think we are supposed to be, people who help call forth human beings from deep inside hopelessness. -- Anne Lamott
Day by day you have to give the work before you all the best stuff you have, not saving up for later projects. If you give freely, there will always be more. -- Anne Lamott
My theory is that, as with our children, as with every surface of that geodesic dome inside the 8-Ball, every age we've ever been is who we are. -- Anne Lamott
To participate requires self-discipline and trust and courage, because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, as my friend Dale puts it, How alive am I willing to be? -- Anne Lamott
Can you imagine the hopelessness of trying to live a spiritual life when you're secretly looking up at the skies not for illumination or direction, but to gauge, miserably, the odds of rain? -- 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
Plot springs from character ... I've always sort of believed that these people inside me- these characters- know who they are and what they're about and what happens, and they need me to help get it down on paper because they don't type. -- Anne Lamott
Sam was alternately distant and clingy and mean, because I am the primary person he banks on and bangs on. I stayed close enough so he could push me away. Sadie slowly floated off. -- Anne Lamott
Everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, and scared, even the people who seem to have it more or less together. They are much more like you than you would believe. So try not to compare your insides to their outsides. -- Anne Lamott
You keep working on your piece over and over, trying to get the sections and paragraphs and sentences and the whole just right, but there's a point at which you can tell you've begun hurting the work with your perfectionism. Then you have to release the work to new eyes. -- Anne Lamott
My best teachers were mess, failure, death, mistakes, and the people I hated, including myself. -- Anne Lamott
I didn't need to understand the hypostatic unity of the Trinity; I just needed to turn my life over to whoever came up with redwood trees. -- Anne Lamott
I see that children fill the existential hollowness many people feel; that when we have children, we know they will need us, and maybe love us, but we don't have a clue how hard it is going to be. -- Anne Lamott
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
You begin to cry and writhe and yell and then to keep on crying; and finally, grief ends up giving you the two best gifts: softness and illumination. Every -- Anne Lamott
I decided to go to the beach at San Quentin, and practice living as if today was one of the precious few left to me. What a concept. -- Anne Lamott
I'm very successful, but there are 50,000 general interest books published every year. If you don't want to read mine, there are others. -- Anne Lamott
When we did art with the kids, the demons would lie down. -- Anne Lamott
This is a difficult country to look too different in - the United States of Advertising, as Paul Krassner puts it - and if you are too skinny or too tall or dark or weird or short or frizzy or homely or poor or nearsighted, you get crucified. I did. But -- Anne Lamott
You stop pretending life is such fin or makes sense. It's often messy and cruel and dull, and we do the best we can. It's unfair, and jerks seem to win. But you fall in love with a few people. -- Anne Lamott
The worst part about celebrating another birthday is the shock that you're only as well as you are. -- Anne Lamott
There are really places in your heart that you don't know exist until you love a child. -- Anne Lamott
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
Jealousy has always been my cross, the weakness and woundedness in me that has most often caused me to feel ugly and unlovable, like the Bad Seed. -- Anne Lamott
A big heart is both a clunky and a delicate thing; it doesn't protect itself and it doesn't hide. It stands out, like a baby's fontanel, where you can see the soul pulse through. -- Anne Lamott
The real payoff is the writing itself, that a day when you have gotten your work done is a good day, that total dedication is the point. -- Anne Lamott
You are going to love some of your characters because they are you or some facet of you, and you are going to hate some of your characters for the same reason. -- Anne Lamott
If you want to feel loving, I coached myself, do something loving. This is basic soul care. -- Anne Lamott
In general, though, there's no point in writing hopeless novels. We all know we're going to die; what's important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this. Sometimes -- Anne Lamott
I tried to cooperate with grace, which is to say, I did not turn on the TV. -- Anne Lamott
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. I can be received gladly or grudgingly, in big gulps or in tiny tastes, like a deer at the salt. -- Anne Lamott
Writing is about hypnotizing yourself into believing in yourself, getting some work done, then unhypnotizing yourself and going over the material coldly. -- Anne Lamott
whatever you use to keep the pain at bay robs you of the flecks and nuggets of gold that feeling grief will give you. -- Anne Lamott
Everything slows down when we listen and stop trying to fix the unfixable. -- Anne Lamott
I devoured books like a person taking vitamins, afraid that otherwise I would remain this gelatinous narcissist, with no possibility of ever becoming thoughtful, of ever being taken seriously. -- Anne Lamott
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
First I showered off that horrible butt smell you get from being on an airplane. [p. 257] -- Anne Lamott
My writer friends, and they are legion, do not go around beaming with quiet feelings of contentment. Most of them go around with haunted, abused, surprised looks on their faces, like lab dogs on whom very personal deodorant sprays have been tested. -- Anne Lamott
They taught us that extending ourselves to others would help us stay sober and sane. But they also wanted us to extend ourselves to our own horrible selves, get ourselves a lovely cup of tea. It was and is the hardest work ever. -- Anne Lamott
Expectations are resentments waiting to happen. -- Anne Lamott
Reading poetry and reading the great works of the canon that we were reading in the '60s and the '70s and '80s was mind altering. -- Anne Lamott
Sin is not the adult bookstore on the corner. It is the hard heart, the lack of generosity, and all the isms, racism and sexism and so forth. But is there a crack where a ribbon of light might get in, might sneak past all the roadblocks and piles of stones, mental and emotional and cultural? We -- Anne Lamott
When people don't have free access to books, then communities are like radios without batteries. -- Anne Lamott
What if you wake up some day, and you're 65 ... and you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life? -- Anne Lamott
Life is like a nice fresh batch of Swiss cheese. Note to self: savor the holes, too, like the spaces between musical notes. -- Anne Lamott
No matter what circumstances, it's hard to be a parent and maintain a sense of self and identity in the world. -- Anne Lamott
The evidence is in, and you are the verdict. -- Anne Lamott
Quiet, deep breath after any prayer is another form of Amen. -- Anne Lamott
Then it came to me: I was asking the wrong question. The right one is: Where is God in gang warfare? And the answer is, The same place God is in Darfur, and in our alcoholism, and when children are bullied: being crucified. -- Anne Lamott
I feel incredibly successful. I make a living as a writer and am able to help support a big family, my church, my bleeding-heart causes. -- Anne Lamott
Tidiness makes me think of held breath, of suspended animation. -- Anne Lamott
Take care of yourselves; take care of one another. -- Anne Lamott
Every single one of us at birth is given an emotional acre all our own. -- Anne Lamott
There are a lot of us, some published, some not, who think the literary life is the loveliest one possible, this life of reading and writing and corresponding. We think this life is nearly ideal. -- Anne Lamott
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
The basic formula for drama is setup, buildup, payoff - just like a joke. The -- Anne Lamott
I carry a secret sense of accomplishment around with me, like a radium pack implanted near my heart that now leaches a quiet sense of relief through my system. -- Anne Lamott
Mattie sat at the table, obsessing, orbiting around herself. She was sick of her worried, hostile mind. It would have killed her long before, she felt, if it hadn't needed the transportation. -- Anne Lamott
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
There is nothing more touching to me then a family picture where everyone is trying to look his or her best, but you can see what a mess they all really are. -- Anne Lamott
And because she did not shove this down my throat, this dawned on me. -- Anne Lamott
These are pictures of the people in my family where we look like the most awkward and desperate folk you ever saw, poster children for the human condition. -- Anne Lamott
Now, practically even better news than that of short assignments is the idea of shitty first drafts. All good writers write them. -- Anne Lamott
Dogs are the closest we come to knowing the divine love of God on this side of eternity. -- Anne Lamott
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
She quoted the Reverend James Forbes as saying, Nobody gets into heaven without a letter of reference from the poor. -- Anne Lamott
It's so great to be able to make people laugh, because this is so often how we get our selves back. -- Anne Lamott
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
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
I spent my whole life helping my mother carry around her psychic trunks like a bitter bellhop. So a great load was lifted when she died, and my life was much easier. -- Anne Lamott
Remember the scene in Cat Ballou where a very drunk Lee Marvin goes from unconscious to ranting to triumphant to roaring to weeping defeat, and then finally passes out? One of the men watching him says, with real awe, "I never seen a man get through a day so fast." Don't let this be you. -- Anne Lamott
Grace is having a commitment to- or at least an acceptance of- being ineffective and foolish. That our bottled charm is the main roadblock to drinking that clear cool glass of love. -- Anne Lamott
Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don't worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent. -- Anne Lamott
When we're dealing with the people in our family - no matter how annoying or gross they may be, no matter how self-inflicted their suffering may appear, no matter how afflicted they are with ignorance, prejudice or nose hairs - we give from the deepest parts of ourselves. -- Anne Lamott
We do endure, and that out of the wreckage something surprising will rise. -- Anne Lamott
Over and over I feel as if my characters know who they are, and what happens to them, and where they have been and where they will go, and what they are capable of doing, but they need me to write it down for them because their handwriting is so bad. -- Anne Lamott
Looking back on the God my friend believed in, he seems a little erratic, not entirely unlike her father - God as borderline personality. -- Anne Lamott
If you are mesmerized by televised stupidity, and don't get to hear or read stories about your world, you can be fooled into thinking that the world isn't miraculous
and it is. -- Anne Lamott
I thought the secret of life was obvious: be here now, love as if your whole life depended on it, find your life's work, and try to get hold of a giant panda. -- Anne Lamott
My father treated them with respect and kindness, his main philosophical and spiritual position being: Don't be an asshole. -- Anne Lamott
Being human can be so dispiriting. It is a real stretch for me a lot of the time. -- Anne Lamott
If you don't believe in what you are saying, there is no point in your saying it. You might as well call it a day and go bowling. -- Anne Lamott
I have been somebody who has not written a great deal about the truth of my family's life. -- Anne Lamott
I get to tell my truth. I get to seek meaning and realization. I get to live fully, wildly, imperfectly. That's why I'm alive. And all I actually have to offer as a writer is my version of life. Every single thing that has happened to me is mine. -- Anne Lamott
The beauty of modesty ... a virtue the world doesn't have much truck with: one ordinary flower in a vase, as opposed to a bouquet. -- Anne Lamott
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
Your experiences will be yours alone. But truth and best friendship will rarely if ever disappoint you. -- Anne Lamott
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
I let my mind wander. -- Anne Lamott
My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I'm grateful for it the way I'm grateful for the ocean. -- Anne Lamott
Everyone is flailing through this life without an owner's manual, with whatever modicum of grace and good humor we can manage. -- Anne Lamott
If you want to make God laugh, tell her your plans. -- Anne Lamott
Rituals are a good signal to your unconscious that it is time to kick in. -- Anne Lamott
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
The good news is that if you don't seal up your heart with caulking compound, and instead stay permeable, people stay alive inside you, and maybe outside you, too, forever. This -- Anne Lamott
I happen to be a Christian, but I know that there is one God. People worshipping goodness and love and kindness and truth are worshipping the same God. -- Anne Lamott
She walked to the front door. 'Hello?'
'Hello,' a woman's voice said.
'Are you a Witness?'
'I swear to God I didn't see a thing. -- Anne Lamott
My heart was broken and my head was just barely inhabitable -- Anne Lamott
The writer's job is to turn the unspeakable into words - not just any words, but, if you can, into rhythm and blues. -- Anne Lamott
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
Small is how blessings, healing, progress and increase occur. -- Anne Lamott
She wants to have hiked; I want to have had dessert. -- Anne Lamott
I don't want something special. I want something beautifully plain. -- Anne Lamott
Being enough was going to have to be an inside job. -- Anne Lamott
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
Her message was always the same: God loved the world, all evidence to the contrary, and we must not give up on God. -- Anne Lamott
I sat down in the sand, breathless with shame and failure. God, I thought, some defender of the weak. Some freedom fighter: Joan of Arc in sunscreen. -- Anne Lamott
Creative expression, whether that means writing, dancing, bird-watching, or cooking, can give a person almost everything that he or she has been searching for: enlivenment, peace, meaning, and the incalculable wealth of time spent quietly in beauty. -- Anne Lamott
You have to make mistakes to find out who you aren't. You take the action, and the insight follows: You don't think your way into becoming yourself. -- Anne Lamott
You may have gotten into the habit of doubting that voice that was telling you quite clearly what was really going on. It is essential you get that back. -- Anne Lamott
On the spiritual path, all the dreck and misery is transformed, maybe not that same day, but still transformed into spiritual fuel or insight. -- Anne Lamott
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
I am learning slowly to bring my crazy pinball-machine mind back to this place ... -- Anne Lamott
Then the singing enveloped me. It was furry and resonant, coming from everyone's very heart. There was no sense of performance or judgment, only that the music was breath and food. -- Anne Lamott
To be great, art has to point somewhere. -- Anne Lamott
Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor, because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong. It is no wonder if we sometimes tend to take ourselves perhaps a bit too seriously. -- Anne Lamott
Prayer usually means praise, or surrender, acknowledging that you have run out of bullets. -- Anne Lamott
Vonnegut said, When I write, I feel like an armless legless man with a crayon in his mouth. -- Anne Lamott
Rest and laughter are the most spiritual and subversive acts of all. Laugh, rest, slow down. -- Anne Lamott
It may just be that you are developing a quiet doggedness. This is priceless. Perfectionism, on the other hand, will only drive you mad. -- Anne Lamott
And that almost everyone was struggling to wake up, to be loved, and not feel so afraid all the time. That's what the cars, degrees, booze, and drugs were about. -- Anne Lamott
Rule 1: When all else fails, follow instructions. And Rule 2: Don't be an asshole. -- Anne Lamott
I like to think that Henry James said his classic line, "A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost," while looking for his glasses, and that they were on top of his head. -- Anne Lamott
I've heard that our greatest cross to carry is ourselves - how gravely we fall short. -- Anne Lamott
What if we never 'get over' certain deaths, or our childhoods? What if the idea that we should have by now, or will, is a great palace lie? What if we're not supposed to? What if it takes a life time ... ? -- Anne Lamott
I watched him carefully. He was making art because he has to, and because he's brave enough to try and make contact, right there on the edge of madness, where he dreams. -- Anne Lamott
This is how we make important changes-- barely, poorly, slowly. -- Anne Lamott
I tell you, families are definitely the training ground for forgiveness. -- Anne Lamott
Music is about as physical as it gets: your essential rhythm is your heartbeat; your essential sound, the breath. We're walking temples of noise, and when you add tender hearts to this mix, it somehow lets us meet in places we couldn't get to any other way. -- Anne Lamott
I'm much calmer as I get older, but I'm still just as capable of getting that strung-out stressed-out feeling of mental and spiritual unwellness. -- Anne Lamott
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
Writing involves seeing people suffer and, as Robert Stone once put it, finding some meaning therein. -- Anne Lamott
When hope is not pinned wriggling onto a shiny image or expectation, it sometimes floats forth and opens. -- Anne Lamott
We're Easter people, living in a Good Friday world. -- Anne Lamott
I recognize the divinity in you, but actually more like, I recognize our each-otherness, instantly -- Anne Lamott
Life does not seem to present itself to me for my convenience, to box itself up nicely so I can write about it with wisdom and a point to make before putting it on a shelf somewhere. -- Anne Lamott
I loved every second of Catholic church. I loved the sickly sweet rotting-pomegranate smells of the incense. I loved the overwrought altar, the birdbath of holy water, the votive candles; I loved that there was a poor box, the stations of the cross rendered in stained glass on the windows. -- Anne Lamott
I was raised in a family where none of us ever raised a voice, so there was no room to express feelings of rage or even unabashed joy - a little bashed joy, here or there, or being mildly disgruntled. -- Anne Lamott
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
We, too, are shadow and light. We are not supposed to know this, or be all these different facets of humanity, bright and dark. We are raised to be bright and shiny, but there is meaning in the acceptance of our dusky and dappled side, and also in defiance. -- Anne Lamott
Gratitude, not understanding, is the secret to joy and equanimity. -- Anne Lamott
The beginning of forgiveness is often exhaustion. You're pooped; thank God. -- Anne Lamott
Prayer means that, in some unique way, we believe we're invited into a relationship with someone who hears us when we speak in silence. -- Anne Lamott
But you can't teach writing, people tell me. And I say, 'Who the hell are you, God's dean of admissions? -- Anne Lamott
It is funny how no one seems to want my always excellent advice. -- Anne Lamott
I understood immediately the thrill of seeing oneself in print. It provides some sort of primal verification: you are in print; therefore you exist. -- Anne Lamott
Grace means suddenly you're in a different universe from the one where you were stuck, and there was absolutely no way for you to get there on your own. -- Anne Lamott
This is where I liked to be when I was hangover or coming down off a cocaine binge, here in the dust with all these dusty people, all this liveliness and clutter and color, things for sale to cheer me up, and greasy food that would slip down by throat. -- Anne Lamott
You can either practice being right or practice being kind. -- Anne Lamott
We were raised to believe in books, music, and nature. -- Anne Lamott
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
Any plot you impose on your characters will be onomatopoetic: PLOT. I say don't worry about plot. Worry about the characters. Let what they say or do reveal who they are, and be involved in their lives, and keep asking yourself, Now what happens? The development of relationship creates plot. -- Anne Lamott
That grace is having a commitment to - or at least an acceptance of - being ineffective and foolish. -- Anne Lamott
When I feel like shoveling in food, the emptiness can be filled only with love
(April 2012, O Magazine) -- Anne Lamott
There is ecstasy in paying attention. -- Anne Lamott
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
How are we going to get through this craziness?' I asked. There was silence for a moment.
'Left foot, right foot, left foot, breathe,' he said. -- Anne Lamott
I'm here to be me, which is taking a great deal longer than I had hoped. -- Anne Lamott
The reason 'help' is such a great prayer is that God is the gift of desperation. When you're in despair, you're teachable. -- Anne Lamott
I hate the summer. -- Anne Lamott
This is all that restoration requires most of the time, that one person not give up. -- Anne Lamott
No" is a complete sentence. -- Anne Lamott
When I was a kid, our family used to watch 'Bonanza.' I really liked having a Sunday night TV ritual. -- Anne Lamott
God can't clean the house of you when you're still in it. -- Anne Lamott
...one of the worst things about being a parent, for me, is the self-discovery, the being face to face with one's secret insanity and brokenness and rage. -- Anne Lamott
You must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you're a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this. -- Anne Lamott
My father really taught me that you really develop the habit of writing and you sit down at the same time every day, you don't wait for inspiration. -- Anne Lamott
When the ancient Egyptians finished building the pyramids, they had built the pyramids. -- Anne Lamott
If you are hoping to find your self-worth and fulfillment in other peoples' opinion of your writing, you will never find it. -- Anne Lamott
Listen to your broccoli and it will tell you how to eat it. -- Anne Lamott
Sometimes love does not look like what you had in mind. -- 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
Every woman's path is difficult, and many mothers were as equipped to raise children as wire monkey mothers. I say that without judgment: It is, sadly, true. An unhealthy mother's love is withering. -- Anne Lamott
We all have the dark, ignorant shadow inside us. I have worked endlessly to reveal it and heal it in me, but of course there's some primitive weird stuff in me. The Tea Party is about exhorting white supremacy, though, so I've had a tiny bit of trouble experiencing sympathy. -- Anne Lamott
I read the same amount of nonfiction and fiction. -- Anne Lamott
Ram Dass, who described himself as a Hin-Jew, said that ultimately we're all just walking each other home. I love that. I try to live by it. -- Anne Lamott
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
I accidentally forgot to graduate from college. -- Anne Lamott
Not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die. -- Anne Lamott
I don't know much, but I understand how entirely doomed I am without God. -- Anne Lamott
You want to avoid at all costs drawing your characters on those that already exist in other works of fiction. You must learn about people from people, not from what you read. Your reading should confirm what you've observed in the world. -- Anne Lamott
The first draft is the child's draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later. -- Anne Lamott
If you have a body, you are entitled to the full range of feelings. It comes with the package. -- Anne Lamott
his cell phone - the adolescent's pacemaker. -- Anne Lamott
The difference between a writer who toughs it out and one who doesn't is that you push through the parts where you know that you've just written seven pages when all you're looking for is one paragraph. -- Anne Lamott
Without using the word, everyone started forgiving each other again. Just like that, from the no of all nothingness: you have a big tense mess and out of it comes some joy. It must be magic. -- Anne Lamott
You can get the monkey off your back, but the circus never leaves town -- 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
Frequently, as so many poets and psalmists and songwriters have said, the invisible shift happens through the broken places. -- Anne Lamott
When faced with a crisis, do three things: breathe, pray and be kind. -- Anne Lamott
I did not raise my son, Sam, to celebrate Mother's Day. I didn't want him to feel some obligation to buy me pricey lunches or flowers, some annual display of gratitude that you have to grit your teeth and endure. -- Anne Lamott
In fact, there's really only one thing that everything's made of; it's energy. -- Anne Lamott
I think Jesus is divine love manifest on Earth, as it comes through the community of Christians. -- Anne Lamott
Robert Burns said it best: Life is but a day at most. -- Anne Lamott
He had the time to hear, like a person who believed there was someone alive beneath the rubble of herself, who heard the soft sounds she could still make from the broken parts that had waited decades to be missed. -- Anne Lamott
Once you know where true is, it defines everything else that has to happen. -- Anne Lamott
It is hard to remember that you are a cherished spiritual being when you're burping up apple fritters and Cheetos. -- Anne Lamott
Wow has a reverberation - wowowowowow - and this pulse can soften us, like the electrical massage an acupuncturist directs to your spine or cramped muscle, which feels like a staple gun, but good. -- Anne Lamott
Very few writers really know what they are doing until they've done it. -- Anne Lamott
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. -- Anne Lamott
Everyone was on God's payroll, whether they knew it or not. -- Anne Lamott
Living on earth has always been a dangerous way to spend your time. -- Anne Lamott
I've known for years that resentments don't hurt the person we resent, but they do hurt us. -- Anne Lamott
You are not your bank account, our your ambitiousness. You're not the cold clay lump with a big belly you leave behind when you die. You're not your collection of walking personality disorders. You are spirit, you are love. -- Anne Lamott
A subterranean murmur. It may sound like one of the many separate voices that make up the sounds of a creek. Or it may come in code, oblique and sneaky, creeping in from around the corner. -- Anne Lamott
It's a great time to be alive. -- Anne Lamott
Don't be mean to yourself, though . . .this is the only sin. -- 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
various people at her church kept saying that she could be happy because she was going home to be with Jesus. This is the sort of thing that gives Christians a bad name. This, and the Inquisition. Sue wanted to open fire on them all. I think I encouraged this. -- Anne Lamott
She wears latex bicycle shorts nearly every day, and I will tell you why: because she can. I consider it an act of aggression against the rest of us mothers who forgot to start working out after we had kids. -- 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
It's intrusive for grandparents to think they're in charge. It's manipulative. Also, it's self-destructive, since if the parents have to resist you, you won't get your mitts on the kid as often. -- Anne Lamott
and you try to quiet your mind so you can hear... -- Anne Lamott
Joy is the best makeup. -- Anne Lamott
I suspect that he was a child who thought differently than his peers, who may have had serious conversations with grown-ups, who as a young person, like me, accepted being alone quite a lot. I think that this sort of person often becomes either a writer or a career criminal. -- Anne Lamott
To love yourself as you are is a miracle, and to seek yourself is to have found yourself for now. And now is all we have, and love is who we are. -- Anne Lamott
If I were going to begin practicing the presence of God for the first time today, it would help to begin by admitting the three most terrible truths of our existence: that we are so ruined, and so loved, and in charge of so little. -- Anne Lamott
I'd like to learn to meditate with more enthusiasm. I can sit down and get quiet for 20 minutes, but it just has not been a part of my Christianity at all. -- Anne Lamott
Now, if you ask me, what's going on is that we're all up to here in it, and probably the most important thing is that we not yell at one another. -- Anne Lamott
Pay attention to the beauty surrounding you. -- Anne Lamott