Top 500 Anne Lamott Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “Your job is to present clearly your viewpoint, your line of vision. Your job is to see people as they really are, and to do this, you have to know who you are in the most compassionate possible sense.”

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

454. “No matter what circumstances, it’s hard to be a parent and maintain a sense of self and identity in the world.”

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

456. “The worst part about celebrating another birthday is the shock that you’re only as well as you are.”

— Anne Lamott

457. “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

458. “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

459. “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

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

— Anne Lamott

461. “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

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

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

464. “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

465. “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

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

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

468. “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

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

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

471. “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

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

— Anne Lamott

473. “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

474. “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

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

— Anne Lamott

476. “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

477. “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

478. “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

479. “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

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

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

482. “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

483. “Laughter is deliverance, bubbly salvation.”

— Anne Lamott

484. “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

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

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

487. “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

488. “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

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

— Anne Lamott

490. “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

491. “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

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

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

494. “Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve thought that there was something noble and mysterious about writing, about the people who could do it well, who could create a world as if they were little gods or sorcerers. All my life I’ve felt that there was something magical about people who could get into other people’s minds and skin, who could take people like me out of ourselves and then take us back to ourselves. And you know what? I still do.”

— Anne Lamott

495. “Small is how blessings, healing, progress and increase occur.”

— Anne Lamott

496. “I kept asking God for help, and after a while I realized something – that Josh was not enjoying this either. He was just trying to take care of himself, and I made the radical decision to let him off the hook.”

— Anne Lamott

497. “Grace arrived, like the big, loopy stitches with which a grandmotherly stranger might baste your hem temporarily.”

— Anne Lamott

498. “I remind myself of this when I cannot get any work done: to live as if I am dying, because the truth is we are all terminal on this bus. To live as if we are dying gives us a chance to experience some real presence.”

— Anne Lamott

499. “We all know we’re going to die; what’s important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this.”

— Anne Lamott

500. “They always threw their arms around and hugged me while crying our Yiddish endearments. Yet none of them believed in God. They believed in social justice, good works, Israel, and Bette Midler. I was nearly thirty before I met a religious Jew.”

— Anne Lamott