Anne Lamott Quotes

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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

Think of a fine painter attempting to capture an inner vision, beginning with one corner of the canvas, painting what she thinks should be there, not quite pulling it off, covering it over with white paint, and trying again, each time finding out what her painting isn't, until she finally finds out what it is. And when you finally do find out what one corner of your vision is; you're off and running.

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 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

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

There 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

Even though you get the monkey off your back, the circus never really leaves town.

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

Sometimes I think that Jesus watches my neurotic struggles, and shakes his head and grips his forehead and starts tossing back mojitos.

Anne Lamott

Jealousy is such a direct attack on whatever measure of confidence you've been able to muster. But if you continue to write, you are probably going to have to deal with it, because some wonderful, dazzling successes are going to happen for some of the most awful, angry, undeserving writers you know-people who are, in other words, not you.

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

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

Life with most teenagers was like having a low-grade bladder infection. It hurts, but you had to tough it out.

Anne Lamott

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

Or you might shout at the top of your lungs or whisper into your sleeve, "I hate you, God." That is a prayer too, because it is real, it is truth, and maybe it is the first sincere thought you've had in months.

Anne Lamott

Elizabeth lived by the adage that expectations were disappointments under construction.

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 could never, ever have said what I was thinking out loud, because it would make Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish.

Anne Lamott

There is ecstasy in paying attention. You can get into a kind of Wordsworthian openness to the world, where you see in everything the essence of holiness.

Anne Lamott

In fact, not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die.

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

I am learning slowly to bring my crazy pinball-machine mind back to this place...

Anne Lamott

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

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

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

Most humbling of all is to comprehend the lifesaving gift that your pit crew of people has been for you, and all the experiences you have shared, the journeys together, the collaborations, births and deaths, divorces, rehab, and vacations, the solidarity you have shown one another. Every so often you realize that without all of them, your life would be barren and pathetic. It would be Death of a Salesman, though with e-mail and texting.

Anne Lamott

Here are the two best prayers I know: 'Help me, help me, help me,' and 'Thank you, thank you, thank you.' A woman I know says, for her morning prayer, 'Whatever,' and then for the evening, 'Oh, well,' but has conceded that these prayers are more palatable for people without children.

Anne Lamott