Anne Lamott Quotes

276 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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
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
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
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
When what we see catches us off guard, and when we write it as realistically and openly as possible, it offers hope. You look around and say, Wow, there's that same mockingbird; there's that woman in the red hat again. The woman in the red hat is about hope because she's in it up to her neck, too, yet every day she puts on that crazy red hat and walks to town.

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
There's an image I've heard people in recovery use—that getting all of one's addictions under control is a little like putting an octopus to bed.

Anne Lamott
If you want to know how God feels about money, look at whom she gives it to.

Anne Lamott
And as it turns out, if one person is praying for you, buckle up. Things can happen.

Anne Lamott
My mother has been dead for several years. But old mothers never die, and they never fade away. They are too complicated for either.

Anne Lamott
You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. 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.

Anne Lamott
Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.

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
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
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
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
The rational mind doesn't nourish you. You assume that it gives you the truth, because the rational mind is the golden calf that this culture worships, but this is not true.

Anne Lamott
Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul.

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
Whenever the world throws rose petals at you, which thrill and seduce the ego, beware. The cosmic banana peel is suddenly going to appear underfoot to make sure you don't take it all too seriously, that you don't fill up on junk food.

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
Part of me loves and respects men so desperately, and part of me thinks they are so embarrassingly incompetent at life and in love. You have to teach them the very basics of emotional literacy. You have to teach them how to be there for you, and part of me feels tender toward them and gentle, and part of me is so afraid of them, afraid of any more violation.

Anne Lamott
Butterflies and birds are like one perfect teaspoon of creation.

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
Trying to reason with an addict was like trying to blow out a lightbulb.

Anne Lamott
Because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be?

Anne Lamott