Top 500 Anne Lamott Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “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

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. “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. “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

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

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

458. “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

459. “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

460. “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

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

— Anne Lamott

462. “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

463. “Science, art, community, and nature make manifest that bad will or mistakes can lead to progress, like Bob Ross on his show The Joy of Painting reminding us that when we make big mistakes on canvas, we can turn them into birds – “Yeah, they’re birds now!”

— Anne Lamott

464. “Her purse was a weight, ballast; it tethered her to the earth as her mind floated away.”

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

467. “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

468. “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

469. “Mark Twain said that Adam was the only man who, when he said a good thing, knew that nobody had said it before.”

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

471. “Laughter is deliverance, bubbly salvation.”

— Anne Lamott

472. “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

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

— Anne Lamott

474. “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

475. “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

476. “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

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. “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

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. “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

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

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

485. “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

486. “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

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

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

489. “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

490. “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

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

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

493. “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

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. “If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act – truth is always subversive.”

— Anne Lamott

496. “Here are the two best prayers I know: ‘Help me, help me, help me’ and ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

498. “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

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

— Anne Lamott

500. “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