Top 500 Anne Lamott Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “Very few writers really know what they are doing until they have done it.”

— Anne Lamott

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

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

— Anne Lamott

156. “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

157. “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

158. “If God was giving me a ham, I’d be crazy not to receive it. Maybe it was the ham of God, who takes away the sins of the world.”

— Anne Lamott

159. “It’s intrusive for grandparents to think they’re in charge. It’s manipulative. Also, it’s self-destructive, since if the parents have to resist you, you won’t get your mitts on the kid as often.”

— Anne Lamott

160. “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

161. “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

162. “Most of me was glad when my mother died. She was a handful, but not in a cute, festive way. More in a life-threatening way, that had caused me a long time ago to give up all hope of ever feeling good about having had her as a mother.”

— Anne Lamott

163. “I don’t think you have time to waste not writing because you are afraid you won’t be good enough at it, and I don’t think you have time to waste on someone who does not respond to you with kindness and respect. You don’t want to spend your time around people who make you hold your breath. You can’t fill up when you’re holding your breath.”

— Anne Lamott

164. “We, too, are shadow and light. We are not supposed to know this, or be all these different facets of humanity, bright and dark. We are raised to be bright and shiny, but there is meaning in the acceptance of our dusky and dappled side, and also in defiance.”

— Anne Lamott

165. “You have to make mistakes to find out who you aren’t. You take the action, and the insight follows: You don’t think your way into becoming yourself.”

— Anne Lamott

166. “I am going to notice the lights of the earth, the sun and the moon and the stars, the lights of our candles as we march, the lights with which spring teases us, the light that is already present.”

— Anne Lamott

167. “Where do we even start on the daily walk of restoration and awakening? We start where we are.”

— Anne Lamott

168. “My mind is a neighborhood I try not to go into alone.”

— Anne Lamott

169. “I am an Aries. Although I do not believe in astrology, I think this is exactly the right sign to have been born under.”

— Anne Lamott

170. “To be great, art has to point somewhere.”

— Anne Lamott

171. “I am learning slowly to bring my crazy pinball-machine mind back to this place...”

— Anne Lamott

172. “Love falls to earth, rises from the ground, pools around the afflicted. Love pulls people back to their feet. Bodies and souls are fed. Bones and lives heal. New blades of grass grow from charred soil. The sun rises.”

— Anne Lamott

173. “A good marriage is supposed to be one where each spouse secretly thinks he or she got the better deal.”

— Anne Lamott

174. “We learn from pain that some of the things we thought were castles turn out to be prisons, and we desperately want out, but even though we built them, we can’t find the door. Yet maybe if you ask God for help in knowing which direction to face, you’ll have a moment of intuition. Maybe you’ll see at least one next right step you can take.”

— Anne Lamott

175. “Or you might shout at the top of your lungs or whisper into your sleeve, “I hate you, God.” That is a prayer too, because it is real, it is truth, and maybe it is the first sincere thought you’ve had in months.”

— Anne Lamott

Featured in: Real Quotes

176. “Some people won’t go the extra mile, and then on their birthday, when no one makes a fuss, they feel neglected and bitter.”

— Anne Lamott

177. “After a while the middle-aged person who lives in her head begins to talk to her soul, the kid.”

— Anne Lamott

178. “The world is always going to be dangerous, and people get badly banged up, but how can there be more meaning than helping one another stand up in a wind and stay warm?”

— Anne Lamott

179. “I spent my whole life helping my mother carry around her psychic trunks like a bitter bellhop. So a great load was lifted when she died, and my life was much easier.”

— Anne Lamott

180. “Late Fragment And did you get what you wanted from this life even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth. RAYMOND CARVER.”

— Anne Lamott

181. “My idea of absolute happiness is to be in bed on a rainy day, with my blankie, my cat, and my dog.”

— Anne Lamott

182. “You just have to keep getting out of your own way so that whatever it is that wants to be written can use you to write it.”

— Anne Lamott

183. “All I ever wanted since I arrived here on earth are the same things I needed as a baby, to go from cold to warm, lonely to held, the vessel to the giver, empty to full.”

— Anne Lamott

184. “I get to tell my truth. I get to seek meaning and realization. I get to live fully, wildly, imperfectly. That’s why I’m alive. And all I actually have to offer as a writer is my version of life. Every single thing that has happened to me is mine.”

— Anne Lamott

185. “Life is really pretty tricky, and there’s a lot of loss, and the longer you stay alive, the more people you lose whom you actually couldn’t live without.”

— Anne Lamott

186. “Everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, and scared.”

— Anne Lamott

187. “My understanding of incarnation is that we are not served by getting away from the grubbiness of suffering. Sometimes we feel that we are barely pulling ourselves forward through a tight tunnel on badly scraped-up elbows. But we do come out the other side, exhausted and changed.”

— Anne Lamott

188. “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories.”

— Anne Lamott

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

189. “It’s funny: I always imagined when I was a kid that adults had some kind of inner toolbox full of shiny tools: the saw of discernment, the hammer of wisdom, the sandpaper of patience. But then when I grew up I found that life handed you these rusty bent old tools – friendships, prayer, conscience, honesty – and said ‘do the best you can with these, they will have to do’. And mostly, against all odds, they do.”

— Anne Lamott

190. “Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there.”

— Anne Lamott

191. “My friend Terry says that when you need to make a decision, in your work or otherwise, and you don’t know what to do, just do one thing or the other, because the worst that can happen is that you will have made a terrible mistake.”

— Anne Lamott

192. “Certainty is missing the point entirely.”

— Anne Lamott

193. “We were raised to believe in books, music, and nature.”

— Anne Lamott

Featured in: Book Quotes

194. “I have a lot of faith. But I am also afraid a lot, and have no real certainty about anything. I remembered something Father Tom had told me – that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns.”

— Anne Lamott

195. “When people shine a little light on their monster, we find out how similar most of our monsters are.”

— Anne Lamott

196. “The physical body is acknowledged as dust, the personal drama as delusion. It is as if the world we perceive through our senses, that whole gorgeous and terrible pageant, were the breath-thin surface of a bubble, and everything else, inside and outside, is pure radiance. Both suffering and joy come then like a brief reflection, and death like a pin.”

— Anne Lamott

197. “We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason why they write so little.”

— Anne Lamott

198. “I just try to love and serve everyone, and bring everyone water, and lend an ear; that’s what Jesus said to do.”

— Anne Lamott

199. “But you can’t get to any of these truths by sitting in a field smiling beatifically, avoiding your anger and damage and grief. Your anger and damage and grief are the way to the truth. We don’t have much truth to express unless we have gone into those rooms and closets and woods and abysses that we were told not go in to. When we have gone in and looked around for a long while, just breathing and finally taking it in – then we will be able to speak in our own voice and to stay in the present moment. And that moment is home.”

— Anne Lamott

200. “Butterflies and birds are like one perfect teaspoon of creation.”

— Anne Lamott