Top 500 Anne Lamott Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Your inside person doesn’t age. Your inside person is soul, is heart, in the eternal now, the ageless, the old, the young, all the ages you’ve ever been.”

— Anne Lamott

52. “I do not at all understand the mystery of grace – only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.”

— Anne Lamott

53. “The difference between you and God is that God doesn’t think He’s you.”

— Anne Lamott

54. “Rest and laughter are the most spiritual and subversive acts of all. Laugh, rest, slow down.”

— Anne Lamott

55. “I go to church every Sunday, which is like going to the gas station once a week and really, really filling up.”

— Anne Lamott

56. “Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.”

— Anne Lamott

57. “We write to expose the unexposed. If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. The writer’s job is to turn the unspeakable into words – not just into any words, but if we can, into rhythm and blues.”

— Anne Lamott

58. “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

59. “Write regularly, whether you feel like writing or not, and whether you think what you’re writing is any good or not.”

— Anne Lamott

60. “Prayer means that, in some unique way, we believe we’re invited into a relationship with someone who hears us when we speak in silence.”

— Anne Lamott

61. “The evidence is in, and you are the verdict.”

— Anne Lamott

62. “To love yourself as you are is a miracle, and to seek yourself is to have found yourself for now. And now is all we have, and love is who we are.”

— Anne Lamott

63. “There is nothing as sweet as a comeback, when you are down and out, about to lose, and out of time.”

— Anne Lamott

64. “To paraphrase Paul Tillich, the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty.”

— Anne Lamott

65. “The miracle is that we are here, that no matter how undone we’ve been the night before, we wake up every morning and are still here. It is phenomenal just to be.”

— Anne Lamott

66. “I didn’t need to understand the hypostatic unity of the Trinity; I just needed to turn my life over to whoever came up with redwood trees.”

— Anne Lamott

67. “We begin to find and become ourselves when we notice how we are already found, already truly, entirely, wildly, messily, marvelously who we were born to be.”

— Anne Lamott

68. “If it is someone else’s problem, you probably don’t have the solution.”

— Anne Lamott

69. “When faced with a crisis, do three things: breathe, pray and be kind.”

— Anne Lamott

70. “Whenever the world throws rose petals at you, which thrill and seduce the ego, beware.”

— Anne Lamott

71. “Laughter is a bubbly, effervescent form of holiness.”

— Anne Lamott

72. “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

73. “Being enough was going to have to be an inside job.”

— Anne Lamott

74. “Your problem is how you are going to spend this one 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 circumstances, or whether you are going to taste it, enjoy it and find out the truth about who you are.”

— Anne Lamott

75. “I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that alot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.”

— Anne Lamott

76. “And as it turns out, if one person is praying for you, buckle up. Things can happen.”

— Anne Lamott

77. “Don’t look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.”

— Anne Lamott

78. “Sometimes Heaven is just a new pair of glasses.”

— Anne Lamott

79. “When everything starts going wrong all at once, it is to protect something big and lovely that is trying to get itself born.”

— Anne Lamott

80. “Churches are good for prayer, but so are garages and cars and mountains and showers and dance floors.”

— Anne Lamott

81. “Laughter is carbonated holiness.”

— Anne Lamott

82. “Creative expression, whether that means writing, dancing, bird-watching, or cooking, can give a person almost everything that he or she has been searching for: enlivenment, peace, meaning, and the incalculable wealth of time spent quietly in beauty.”

— Anne Lamott

83. “Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don’t worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent.”

— Anne Lamott

84. “I do not know much about God and prayer, but I have come to believe over the last twenty-five years, that there’s something to be said about keeping prayer simple. Help, Thanks, Wow.”

— Anne Lamott

85. “I don’t remember who said this, but there really are places in the heart you don’t even know exist until you love a child.”

— Anne Lamott

86. “Sometimes grace is a ribbon of mountain air that gets in through the cracks.”

— Anne Lamott

87. “I write because writing is the gift God has given me to help people in the world.”

— Anne Lamott

88. “And she is going to dance, dance hungry, dance full, dance each cold astonishing moment, now when she is young and again when she is old.”

— Anne Lamott

89. “I am going to try to pay attention to the spring. I am going to look around at all the flowers, and look up at the hectic trees. I am going to close my eyes and listen.”

— Anne Lamott

90. “Nothing can be delicious when you are holding your breath.”

— Anne Lamott

91. “I get up. I walk. I fall down. Meanwhile, I keep dancing.”

— Anne Lamott

92. “Once an old woman at my church said the secret is that God loves us exactly the way we are and that he loves us too much to let us stay like this, and I’m just trying to trust that.”

— Anne Lamott

93. “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

94. “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

95. “Getting into a new relationship is like pouring Miracle-Gro on your character defects.”

— Anne Lamott

96. “This is the Easter message, that awakening is possible, to the goodness of God, the sacredness of human life, the sisterhood and brotherhood of all.”

— Anne Lamott

97. “Joy is the best makeup. But a little lipstick is a close runner-up.”

— Anne Lamott

98. “Everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, and scared, even the people who seem to have it more or less together. They are much more like you than you would believe. So try not to compare your insides to their outsides.”

— Anne Lamott

99. “E-books are great for instant gratification – you see a review somewhere of a book that interests you, and you can start reading it five minutes later.”

— Anne Lamott

100. “Some people have a thick skin and you don’t. Your heart is really open and that is going to cause pain, but that is an appropriate response to this world. The cost is high, but the blessing of being compassionate is beyond your wildest dreams.”

— Anne Lamott