Top 500 Anne Lamott Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “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

452. “I mean “God” as shorthand for the Good, for the animating energy of love; for Life, for the light that radiates from within people and from above; in the energies of nature, even in our rough, messy selves.”

— Anne Lamott

453. “I’d like to learn to meditate with more enthusiasm. I can sit down and get quiet for 20 minutes, but it just has not been a part of my Christianity at all.”

— Anne Lamott

454. “Jesus was soft on crime. He’d never have been elected anything.”

— Anne Lamott

455. “Astonishing material and revelation appear in our lives all the time. Let it be. Unto us, so much is given. We just have to be open for business.”

— Anne Lamott

456. “My mother’s eyes were large and brown, like my son’s, but unlike Sam’s, they were always frantic, like a hummingbird who can’t quite find the flower but keeps jabbing around.”

— Anne Lamott

457. “I’m probably just as good a mother as the next repressed, obsessive-compulsive paranoiac.”

— Anne Lamott

458. “Rumi: “Where there is ruin, there is hope for a treasure.”

— Anne Lamott

459. “Will call him a she when the pee-pee is gone. Says “Brave is to endure stares, jeers, prejudice. He won’t.”

— Anne Lamott

460. “I don’t think anything is the opposite of love.”

— Anne Lamott

461. “Everything takes me forever. It’s all lurch, flail. I hope that is good news to you writers.”

— Anne Lamott

462. “That thing you had to force yourself to do-the actual act of writing-turns out to be the best part.”

— Anne Lamott

463. “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

464. “Believing isn’t the hard part; waiting on God is. So I stuck with it and prayed impatiently for patience, and to stop feeling disgusted by myself, and to believe for a few moments that God, just a bit busy with other suffering in the world, actually cared about one menopausal white woman on a binge.”

— Anne Lamott

465. “I can never tell what I’m doing when I’m in the middle of publication because I have no confidence. I have terrible self-esteem, along with boundless narcissism.”

— Anne Lamott

466. “I don’t write about the intimate details of my cousins and aunts and uncles, and my mother and my father because it’s not right to, for me.”

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

468. “My main problem is that over and over again, I try to get all my characters to say stuff that I think is so witty or erudite you know, so that everybody will go.”

— Anne Lamott

469. “I’m not going to change the way people think about me, but I can say you know what? I’m not going to carry that in my backpack.”

— Anne Lamott

470. “I became a Christian before I got sober. So I was a drunk, bulimic Christian.”

— Anne Lamott

471. “There are moments when I am writing when I think that if other people knew how I felt right now, they’d burn me at the stake for feeling so good, so full, so much intense pleasure.”

— Anne Lamott

472. “I used to love to untangle chains when I was a child. I had thin, busy fingers, and I never gave up. Perhaps there was a psychiatric component to my concentration but like much of my psychic damage, this worked to everyone’s advantage.”

— Anne Lamott

473. “Even if only the people in your writing group read your memoirs or stories or novel, even if you only wrote your story so that one day your children would know what life was like when you were a child and you knew the name of every dog in town – still, to have written your version is an honorable thing to have done.”

— Anne Lamott

474. “Love is so much bigger than our ignorance.”

— Anne Lamott

475. “I’ve seen prayers answered. But often, in my experiences, if you get what you pray for, you’ve really shortchanged yourself.”

— Anne Lamott

476. “Being a writer is part of a noble tradition, as is being a musician – the last egalitarian and open associations. No matter what happens in terms of fame and fortune, dedication to writing is a marching-step forward from where you were before, when you didn’t care about reaching out to the world, when you weren’t hoping to contribute, when you were just standing there doing some job into which you had fallen.”

— Anne Lamott

477. “And that almost everyone was struggling to wake up, to be loved, and not feel so afraid all the time. That’s what the cars, degrees, booze, and drugs were about.”

— Anne Lamott

478. “One has to be done with the pretense of being just fine, unscarred, perfectly self-sufficient. No one is.”

— Anne Lamott

479. “I’m drawn to almost any piece of writing with the words ‘divine love’ and ‘impeachment’ in the first sentence. But I know the word ‘divine’ makes many progressive people run screaming for their cute little lives, and so one hesitates to use it.”

— Anne Lamott

480. “First find a path, and a little light to see by. Then push up your sleeves and start helping.”

— Anne Lamott

481. “You begin to cry and writhe and yell and then to keep on crying; and finally, grief ends up giving you the two best gifts: softness and illumination. Every.”

— Anne Lamott

482. “Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding space,’ to quote the late, great Zora Neale Hurston. It.”

— Anne Lamott

483. “I think Jesus is divine love manifest on Earth, as it comes through the community of Christians.”

— Anne Lamott

484. “If I have a huge audience, I’d like a bigger audience; maybe slightly a slightly more illustrious audience.”

— Anne Lamott

485. “All criticism hurts me. I’m so in the wrong business.”

— Anne Lamott

486. “We have to make ourselves available to one another, or we can’t experience goodness. It’s not so much us seeking God, tracking Her down with a butterfly net; it’s agreeing to be found. The Old Girl reaches out to everyone and wants to include us in this beautiful, weird, sometimes anguished life. All people: go figure.”

— Anne Lamott

487. “Anything you say from your heart to God is a prayer.”

— Anne Lamott

488. “I like the desert for short periods of time, from inside a car, with the windows rolled up, and the doors locked. I prefer beach resorts with room service.”

— Anne Lamott

489. “Into every life crap will fall. Most of us do as well as possible, and some of it works okay, and we try to release that which doesn’t and which is never going to.”

— Anne Lamott

490. “Laughter is deliverance, bubbly salvation.”

— Anne Lamott

491. “Other days, though, my writing is like a person to me – the person who, after all these years, still makes sense to me.”

— Anne Lamott

492. “I never had a particularly strong craving to procreate, except for earlier fantasies of wanting to be Marmee in Little Women.”

— Anne Lamott

493. “I feel incredibly successful. I make a living as a writer and am able to help support a big family, my church, my bleeding-heart causes.”

— Anne Lamott

494. “I understood that the man I was calling for could never ever come back. Because I understood that the man that I was calling for was dead.”

— Anne Lamott

495. “In fact, there’s really only one thing that everything’s made of; it’s energy.”

— Anne Lamott

496. “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

497. “I accidentally forgot to graduate from college.”

— Anne Lamott

498. “I’m kind of a gossip hound, but watching the media whip the small fires into giant forest fires so that they can cover the result is infuriating.”

— Anne Lamott

499. “If our lives are made up of a string of a thousand moments, at some of those moments we look a lot more spiritually evolved than at others.”

— Anne Lamott

500. “Even mushrooms respond to light – I suppose they blink their mushroomy little eyes, like the rest of us.”

— Anne Lamott