Anne Lamott Quotes

276 Sourced Quotes

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
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
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
The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good 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. But we do. We have so much we want to say and figure out.

Anne Lamott
Her purse was a weight, ballast; it tethered her to the earth as her mind floated away.

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
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
Rituals are a good signal to your unconscious that it is time to kick in.

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
Most people's intuitions are drowned out by folk sayings. We have a moment of real feeling or insight, and then we come up with a folk saying that captures the insight in a kind of wash. The intuition may be real and ripe, fresh with possibilities, but the folk saying is guaranteed to be a cliche, stale and self-contained.

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
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
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
Butterflies and birds are like one perfect teaspoon of creation.

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

Anne Lamott
For twenty years I have ached to go back home, when there was nobody there to whom I could return.

Anne Lamott
But easy's like, who cares? Easy's like, how much is easy going to get you?

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
Not forgiving is like drinking rat poison, and then waiting around for the rat to die.

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