Anne Lamott Quotes

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Grief, as I read somewhere once, is a lazy Susan. One day it is heavy and underwater, and the next day it spins and stops at loud and rageful, and the next day at wounded keening, and the next day numbness, silence.

Anne Lamott
Music is about as physical as it gets: your essential rhythm is your heartbeat; your essential sound, the breath. We're walking temples of noise, and when you add tender hearts to this mix, it somehow lets us meet in places we couldn't get to any other way.

Anne Lamott
I guess he'll have to figure out someday that he is supposed to have this dark side, that it is part of what it means to be human, to have the darkness just as much as the light- that in fact the dark parts make the light visible; without them, the light would disappear. But I guess he has to figure other stuff out first, like how to keep his neck from flopping all over the place and how to sit up.

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
My heart was broken and my head was just barely inhabitable.

Anne Lamott
Since you can't heal your own sick mind with your own sick mind, I needed to consult somebody else's sick mind.

Anne Lamott
A big heart is both a clunky and a delicate thing; it doesn't protect itself and it doesn't hide. It stands out like a baby's fontanel, where you can see the soul pulse through.

Anne Lamott
Sam said to me the other day, "I love you like 20 tyrannosauruses on 20 mountaintops," and this is the exact same way in which I love him.

Anne Lamott
Novels ought to have hope; at least, American novels ought to have hope. French novels don't need to. We mostly win wars, they lose them. Of course, they did hide more Jews than many other countries, and this is a form of winning.

Anne Lamott
Forgiveness means it finally becomes unimportant that you hit back. You're done. It doesn't necessarily mean that you want to have lunch with the person. If you keep hitting back, you stay trapped in the nightmare.

Anne Lamott
When my friend Pammy was dying at the age of 37 we went shopping at Macy's. She was in a wheelchair, with a wig and three weeks to live. I tried on a short dress and came out to model it for Pammy. I asked if she thought it made me look big in the thighs, and she said, so kindly, 'Annie? You just don't have that kind of time.' I live by this story.

Anne Lamott
Rest and laughter are the most spiritual and subversive acts of all. Laugh, rest, slow down.

Anne Lamott
Seeing yourself in print is such an amazing concept: you can get so much attention without having to actually show up somewhere.... There are many obvious advantages to this. You don't have to dress up, for instance, and you can't hear them boo you right away.

Anne Lamott
I woke up full of hate and fear the day before the most recent peace march in San Francisco. This was disappointing: I'd hoped to wake up feeling somewhere between Virginia Woolf and Wavy Gravy.

Anne Lamott
I took notes on the people around me, in my town, in my family, in my memory. I took notes on my own state of mind, my grandiosity, the low self-esteem. I wrote down the funny stuff I overheard. I learned to be like a ship's rat, veined ears trembling, and I learned to scribble it all down.

Anne Lamott
Your problem is how you are going to spend this one odd and precious life you have been issued. Whether you're going to spend it trying to look good and creating the illusion that you have power over people and circumstances, or whether you are going to taste it, enjoy it and find out the truth about who you are.

Anne Lamott
A priest friend of mine has cautioned me away from the standard God of our childhoods, who loves and guides you and then, if you are bad, roasts you: God as high school principal in a gray suit who never remembered your name but is always leafing unhappily through your files.

Anne Lamott
If you are a writer, or want to be a writer, this is how you spend your days—listening, observing, storing things away, making your isolation pay off. You take home all you've taken in, all that you've overheard, and you turn it into gold. (Or at least you try.)

Anne Lamott
The three things I cannot change are the past, the truth, and you.

Anne Lamott
The problem is acceptance, which is something we're taught not to do. We're taught to improve uncomfortable situations, to change things, alleviate unpleasant feelings. But if you accept the reality that you have been given- that you are not in a productive creative period- you free yourself to begin filling up again.

Anne Lamott
Sometimes, no matter how screwed up things seem, I feel like we're all at a wedding. But you can't just come out and say, We're at a wedding! Have some cake! You need to create a world into which we can enter, a world where we can see this.

Anne Lamott
Very few writers really know what they are doing until they have done it.

Anne Lamott
You are going to have to give and give and give, or there's no reason for you to be writing. You have to give from the deepest part of yourself, and you are going to have to go on giving, and the giving is going to have to be its own reward. There is no cosmic importance to your getting something published, but there is in learning to be a giver.

Anne Lamott
Summer nearly does me in every year. It's too hot and the light is unforgiving and the days go on way too long.

Anne Lamott
Prayer is talking to something or anything with which we seek union, even if we are bitter or insane or broken. (In fact, these are probably the best possible conditions under which to pray.) Prayer is taking a chance that against all odds and past history, we are loved and chosen, and do not have to get it together before we show up.

Anne Lamott
This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense of--please forgive me--wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small, bordered worlds.

Anne Lamott
I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all it is cracked up to be. But writing is.

Anne Lamott
I'm human, you're human, let me greet your humanness. Let's be people together for a while.

Anne Lamott
Frequently, as so many poets and psalmists and songwriters have said, the invisible shift happens through the broken places.

Anne Lamott
The movement of grace toward gratitude brings us from the package of self-obsessed madness to a spiritual awakening.

Anne Lamott