Anne Lamott Quotes

276 Sourced Quotes

The last song was so deep and raw and pure that I could not escape. It was as if the people were singing in between the notes, weeping and joyful at the same time, and I felt like their voices or something was rocking me in its bosom, holding me like a scared kid, and I opened up to that feeling-and it washed over me.

Anne Lamott
Help" is a prayer that is always answered. It doesn't matter how you pray—with your head bowed in silence, or crying out in grief, or dancing. Churches are good for prayer, but so are garages and cars and mountains and showers and dance floors. Years ago I wrote an essay that began, "Some people think that God is in the details, but I have come to believe that God is in the bathroom.

Anne Lamott
Sometimes grace works like water wings when you feel you are sinking.

Anne Lamott
We write to expose the unexposed. 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
If we stay where we are, where we're stuck, where we're comfortable and safe, we die there... When nothing new can get in, that's death.

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
Everyone has come to understand that unconditional love is a reality, but with as shelf life of about eight to ten seconds.

Anne Lamott
Get to know your characters as well as you can let there be something at stake, and then let the chips fall where they may.

Anne Lamott
Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don't drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor's yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper.

Anne Lamott
And my fear of failure has been lifelong and deep. If you are what you do- and I think my parents may have accidentally given me this idea- and you do poorly, what then? It's over; you're wiped out. All those prophecies you heard in the dark have come true, and people can see the real you, see what a schmendrick you are, what a fraud.

Anne Lamott
I went to church with my grandparents sometimes and I loved it.

Anne Lamott
The earth is rocky and full of roots; it's clay, and it seems doomed and polluted, but you dig little holes for the ugly shriveled bulbs, throw in a handful of poppy seeds, and cover it all over, and you know you'll never see it again - it's death and clay and shrivel, and your hands are nicked from the rocks, your nails black with soil.

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
Age has given me what I was looking for my entire life — it gave me me. It provided the time and experience and failures and triumphs and friends who helped me step into the shape that had been waiting for me all my life.... I have become the woman I hardly dared imagine I could be.

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
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
It was not facing what life dealt that made you crazy, but rather trying to set life straight where it was unstraightenable.

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
A good marriage is where both people feel like they're getting the better end of the deal.

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
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
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