Top 500 Anne Lamott Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Good therapy helps. Good friends help. Pretending that we are doing better than we are doesn’t. Shame doesn’t. Being heard does.”

— Anne Lamott

102. “I don’t want something special. I want something beautifully plain.”

— Anne Lamott

103. “Because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be?”

— Anne Lamott

104. “Forgiveness is having given up all hope of having had a better past.”

— Anne Lamott

105. “Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.”

— Anne Lamott

106. “If I were going to begin practicing the presence of God for the first time today, it would help to begin by admitting the three most terrible truths of our existence: that we are so ruined, and so loved, and in charge of so little.”

— Anne Lamott

107. “I don’t think you have time to waste not writing because you are afraid you won’t be good at it.”

— Anne Lamott

108. “Joy is the best makeup.”

— Anne Lamott

109. “I’m human, you’re human, let me greet your humanness. Let’s be people together for a while.”

— Anne Lamott

110. “I thought such awful thoughts that I cannot even say them out loud because they would make Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish.”

— Anne Lamott

111. “The reason I never give up hope is because everything is so basically hopeless.”

— Anne Lamott

112. “My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I’m grateful for it the way I’m grateful for the ocean.”

— Anne Lamott

113. “Sometimes grace works like water wings when you feel you are sinking.”

— Anne Lamott

114. “There is nothing more touching to me then a family picture where everyone is trying to look his or her best, but you can see what a mess they all really are.”

— Anne Lamott

115. “So a moral position is not a message. A moral position is a passionate caring inside you.”

— Anne Lamott

116. “Everybody thinks their opinion is the right one. If they didn’t, they would get a new one.”

— Anne Lamott

117. “When you make friends with fear, it can’t rule you.”

— Anne Lamott

118. “Just take it bird by bird.”

— Anne Lamott

119. “The harm is in the unwanted help or helping them when they need to figure things out for themselves. Help is the sunny side of control.”

— Anne Lamott

120. “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

121. “By the end I was deteriorating faster than I could lower my standards.”

— Anne Lamott

122. “The grief and tears didn’t wash me away. They gave me my life back! They cleansed me, baptized me, hydrated the earth at my feet.”

— Anne Lamott

123. “Forgiving people doesn’t necessarily mean you want to meet them for lunch. It means you try to undo the Velcro hook. Lewis Smedes said it best: “To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.”

— Anne Lamott

124. “The movement of grace toward gratitude brings us from the package of self-obsessed madness to a spiritual awakening.”

— Anne Lamott

125. “Summer nearly does me in every year. It’s too hot and the light is unforgiving and the days go on way too long.”

— Anne Lamott

126. “Hope is not logical. It always comes as a surprise, just when you think all hope is lost. Hope is the cousin to grief, and both take time: you can’t short-circuit grief, or emptiness, and you can’t patch it up with your bicycle tire tube kit. You have to take the next right action.”

— Anne Lamott

127. “Help is the sunny side of control.”

— Anne Lamott

128. “Teenagers who do not go to church are adored by God, but they don’t get to meet some of the people who love God back.”

— Anne Lamott

129. “Everyone is flailing through this life without an owner’s manual, with whatever modicum of grace and good humor we can manage.”

— Anne Lamott

130. “The medieval German mystic Meister Eckhart said that if the soul could have known God without the world, God never would have created the world.”

— Anne Lamott

131. “Good writing is about telling the truth.”

— Anne Lamott

132. “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

133. “This is a very violent place to live, the Earth, and we’re a very violent species. Cain is still killing Abel. We see that every day.”

— Anne Lamott

134. “I thought the secret of life was obvious: be here now, love as if your whole life depended on it, find your life’s work, and try to get hold of a giant panda.”

— Anne Lamott

135. “This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won’t wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be.”

— Anne Lamott

136. “A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft – you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft – you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it’s loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.”

— Anne Lamott

137. “Sometimes this human stuff is slimy and pathetic – jealousy especially so – but better to feel it and talk about it and walk through it than to spend a lifetime being silently poisoned.”

— Anne Lamott

138. “I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her.”

— Anne Lamott

139. “So Rita and I decided that the most subversive, revolutionary thing I could do was to show up for my life and not be ashamed.”

— Anne Lamott

140. “This is one thing they forget to mention in most child-rearing books, that at times you will just lose your mind. Period.”

— Anne Lamott

141. “If you don’t know where to start, remember that every single thing that happened to you is yours and you get to tell it.”

— Anne Lamott

142. “Some people seem to understand this – that life and change take time – but I am not one of those people.”

— Anne Lamott

143. “Sometimes I think that Jesus watches my neurotic struggles, and shakes his head and grips his forehead and starts tossing back mojitos.”

— Anne Lamott

144. “I just can’t get over how much babies cry. I really had no idea what I was getting into. To tell you the truth, I thought it would be more like getting a cat.”

— Anne Lamott

145. “Over and over I feel as if my characters know who they are, and what happens to them, and where they have been and where they will go, and what they are capable of doing, but they need me to write it down for them because their handwriting is so bad.”

— Anne Lamott

146. “Help, Thanks, Wow.”

— Anne Lamott

147. “Peace is joy at rest. Joy is peace on its feet. quoting her pastor in Salon, April 25, 2003.”

— Anne Lamott

148. “Very few writers really know what they are doing until they have done it.”

— Anne Lamott

149. “You want to give me chocolate and flowers? That would be great. I love them both. I just don’t want them out of guilt, and I don’t want them if you’re not going to give them to all the people who helped mother our children.”

— Anne Lamott

150. “Writing is how I communicate my deepest beliefs, and what I hope are helpful observations about our dual citizenship, as children of God, as regular old mixed-up, worried, flawed, precious human beings.”

— Anne Lamott