Anne Lamott Quotes

276 Sourced Quotes

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
I heard a preacher say recently that hope is a revolutionary patience; let me add that so is being a writer. 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've known for years that resentments don't hurt the person we resent, but they do hurt us.

Anne Lamott
Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor; the enemy of the people. It will keep you insane your whole life.

Anne Lamott
Gratitude begins in our hearts and then dovetails into behavior. It almost always makes you willing to be of service, which is where the joy resides.

Anne Lamott
It's incredibly touching when someone who seems so hopeless finds a few inches of light to stand in and makes everything work as well as possible. All of us lurch and fall, sit in the dirt, are helped to our feet, keep moving, feel like idiots, lose our balance, gain it, help others get back on their feet, and keep going.

Anne Lamott
In this dark and wounded society, writing can give you the pleasures of the woodpecker, of hollowing out a hole in a tree where you can build your own nest and say, This is my niche, this is where I live now, this is where I belong.

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
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
I can tell you that what you're looking for is already inside you.

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
I've given guys blow jobs just because I've run out of things to talk about.' Oh, Rae. Who hasn't

Anne Lamott
Maybe it's wishful thinking, this snaggly faith of mine, or maybe it's Miles Davis saying, Don't play what's there, play what's not there.

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
It's good to do uncomfortable things. It's weight training for life.

Anne Lamott
She does not have an ounce of fat on her body. I completely hate that in a person. I consider it an act of aggression against the rest of us mothers who forgot to start working out after we had our kids.

Anne Lamott
What if we gave fifty percent of our discretionary budget to the world's poor and then counted on the moral power of that action to protect us?

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
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
Astonishing material and revelation appear in our lives all the time. Let it be. Unto us, so much is given. We just have to be open for business.

Anne Lamott
Where do we even start on the daily walk of restoration and awakening? We start where we are.

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
I think this is how we are supposed to be in the world-present and in awe.

Anne Lamott
Most of the time, all you have is the moment, and the imperfect love of the people around you.

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