Anne Lamott Quotes

276 Sourced Quotes

All I ever wanted since I arrived here on Earth were the things that turned out to be within reach. The same things I needed as a baby - to go from cold to warm, lonely to held, the vessel to the giver, empty to full. You can change the world with a hot bath, if you sink into it from a place of knowing that you are worth profound care, even when you're dirty and rattled. Who knew?

Anne Lamott
If God was giving me a ham, I'd be crazy not to receive it. Maybe it was the ham of God, who takes away the sins of the world.

Anne Lamott
My deepest belief is that to live as if we're dying can set us free. Dying people teach you to pay attention and to forgive and not to sweat the small things.

Anne Lamott
My understanding is that you get to choose which of your thoughts to go with.

Anne Lamott
I get thirsty people glasses of water, even if that thirsty person is just me.

Anne Lamott
Gratitude begins in our hearts and then dovetails into behavior. It almost always makes you willing to be of service, which is where the joy resides.

Anne Lamott
I do believe that God is with us even when we're at our craziest and that this goodness guides, provides, and protects.

Anne Lamott
The first draft is the child's draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later.

Anne Lamott
The best thing about being an artist, instead of a madman or someone who writes letters to the editor, is that you get to engage in satisfying work. Even if you never publish a word, you have something important to pour yourself into.

Anne Lamott
When he sees little kids sitting in the backseat of cars, in those little car seats that have steering wheels, with grim expressions of concentration on their faces, clearly convinced that their efforts are causing the car to do whatever it is doing, he thinks of himself and his relationship with God: God who drives along silently, gently amused, in the real driver's seat.

Anne Lamott
Some people seem to understand this - that life and change take time - but I am not one of those people.

Anne Lamott
I was raised by my parents to believe that you had a moral obligation to try and help save the world.

Anne Lamott
One line of dialogue that rings true reveals character in a way that pages of description can't.

Anne Lamott
Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor, because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong. It is no wonder if we sometimes tend to take ourselves perhaps a bit too seriously.

Anne Lamott
For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.

Anne Lamott
Every time I see the bumper sticker that says We think we're humans having spiritual experiences, but we're really spirits having human experiences, I (a) think it's true and (b) want to ram the car.

Anne Lamott
You just have to keep getting out of your own way so that whatever it is that wants to be written can use you to write it.

Anne Lamott
When you pray, you are not starting the conversation from scratch, just remembering to plug back into a conversation that's always in progress.

Anne Lamott
Where do we even start on the daily walk of restoration and awakening? We start where we are.

Anne Lamott
We want a sense that an important character, like a narrator, is reliable. We want to believe that a character is not playing ages or being coy or being manipulative, but is telling the truth to the best of his or her ability...We do not wish to be crudely manipulated...We want to be massaged by a masseur, not whapped by a carpet beater.

Anne Lamott
There is a door we all want to walk through and writing can help you find it and open it.

Anne Lamott
Slowly, after dozens of rejection slips and failures and false starts and postponed dreams--what Langston Hughes called dreams deferred--I stepped onto the hallowed ground of being a published novelist, and then, fifteen years later, I started to make real money.

Anne Lamott
Dialogue that is written in dialect is very tiring to read. If you can do it brilliantly, fine. If other writers read your work and rave about your use of dialect, go for it. But be positive that you do it well, because otherwise it is a lot of work to read short stories or novels that are written in dialect. It makes our necks feel funny.

Anne Lamott
We all often feel like we are pulling teeth, even those writers whose prose ends up being the most natural and fluid. The right words and sentences just do not come pouring out like ticker tape most of the time.

Anne Lamott
This business of having been issued a body is deeply confusing... Bodies are so messy and disappointing.

Anne Lamott
I'd wanted to be a writer my whole life. But when I finally made it, I felt like a greyhound catching the mechanical rabbit she'd been chasing for so long--discovering it was merely metal, wrapped in cloth. It wasn't alive; it had no spirit. It was fake.

Anne Lamott
If you have a problem you can solve by throwing money at it, you don't have a very interesting problem.

Anne Lamott
So I was doing well academically, and I was a well-ranked tennis player and was the apple of my handsome father's eye-and then I would bring home a report card with a B-plus on it, and my parents would look at the report card as if I'd flunked. "Uh, honey?" one of them would ask, looking perplexed. "Now, this isn't a criticism but, if you could get a B-plus in philosophy, how much harder would it have been to get an A-minus?"

Anne Lamott
We are not here to see through one another, but to see one another through.

Anne Lamott
My best teachers were mess, failure, death, mistakes, and the people I hated, including myself.

Anne Lamott