Top 500 Anne Lamott Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

152. “When we search for something larger than our own selves to hook into, we can come through whatever life throws at us.”

— Anne Lamott

153. “People help you or you help them and when we offer or receive help, we take in each other. And then we are saved.”

— Anne Lamott

154. “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

155. “My understanding is that you get to choose which of your thoughts to go with.”

— Anne Lamott

156. “Help, Thanks, Wow.”

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

158. “I am all the ages I’ve ever been.”

— Anne Lamott

159. “I think this is how we are supposed to be in the world-present and in awe.”

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

161. “All I ever wanted was to belong, to wear that hat of belonging.”

— Anne Lamott

162. “For the climax, there must be a killing or a healing or a domination.”

— Anne Lamott

163. “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

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

— Anne Lamott

165. “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

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

174. “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

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

178. “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. Faith also means reaching deeply within, for the sense one was born with, the sense, for example, to go for a walk.”

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

181. “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

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

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

184. “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

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

— Anne Lamott

186. “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

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187. “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

188. “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

189. “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

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

— Anne Lamott

191. “If you have a body, you are entitled to the full range of feelings. It comes with the package.”

— Anne Lamott

192. “To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass.”

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

194. “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

195. “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

196. “They taught me that maturity was the ability to live with unresolved problems.”

— Anne Lamott

197. “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

198. “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

199. “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

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

— Anne Lamott