Top 500 Anne Lamott Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 3 of 10

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

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

104. “Joy is the best makeup.”

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

106. “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

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

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

109. “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

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

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

114. “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

115. “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

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

— Anne Lamott

117. “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

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

— Anne Lamott

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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

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

— Anne Lamott

123. “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

124. “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

125. “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

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

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

128. “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

129. “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

130. “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

131. “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

132. “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

133. “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

134. “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

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

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

137. “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

138. “Just take it bird by bird.”

— Anne Lamott

139. “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

140. “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

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

— Anne Lamott

142. “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

143. “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

144. “Getting all your addictions under control is like trying to put an octopus to bed.”

— Anne Lamott

145. “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

146. “Grace means you’re in a different universe from where you had been stuck, when you had absolutely no way to get there on your own.”

— Anne Lamott

147. “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

148. “I think we’re all pretty crazy on this bus. I’m not sure I know anyone who’s got all the dots on his or her dice.”

— Anne Lamott

149. “You can change the world with a hot bath, if you sink into it from a place of knowing that you are worth profound care, even when you’re dirty and rattled.”

— Anne Lamott

150. “I don’t have any romantic views of parenting. Every step of the way it’s really hard. It’s a dangerous world, physically and psychologically.”

— Anne Lamott