Top 500 Anne Lamott Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “How are we going to get through this craziness?′ I asked. There was silence for a moment. ‘Left foot, right foot, left foot, breathe,’ he said.”

— Anne Lamott

252. “I’m very successful, but there are 50,000 general interest books published every year. If you don’t want to read mine, there are others.”

— Anne Lamott

253. “How can we know all this, yet somehow experience joy? Because that’s how we are designed – for awareness and curiosity. We are hardwired with curiosity inside us, because life knew that this would keep us going even in bad sailing.”

— Anne Lamott

254. “Love is gentle if sometimes amused warmth for annoying and deeply disappointing people, especially ourselves.”

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

257. “You want to protect your child from pain, and what you get instead is life, and grace; and though theologians insist that grace is freely given, the truth is that sometimes you pay for it through the nose. And you can’t pay your child’s way.”

— Anne Lamott

258. “We all often feel like we are pulling teeth, even those writers whose prose ends up being the most natural and fluid. The right words and sentences just do not come pouring out like ticker tape most of the time.”

— Anne Lamott

259. “Easter is so profound. Christmas was an afterthought in the early Church, the birth not observed for a couple hundred years. But no one could help noticing the resurrection: Rumi said that spring was Christ, “martyred plants rising up from their shrouds.” Easter says that love is more powerful than death, bigger than the dark, bigger than cancer, bigger even than airport security lines.”

— Anne Lamott

260. “A nun I know once told me she kept begging God to take her character defects away from her. After years of this prayer, God finally got back to her: I’m not going to take anything away from you, you have to give it to Me.”

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

262. “You are not your bank account, our your ambitiousness. You’re not the cold clay lump with a big belly you leave behind when you die. You’re not your collection of walking personality disorders. You are spirit, you are love.”

— Anne Lamott

263. “Nothing heals us like letting people know our scariest parts: When people listen to you cry and lament, and look at you with love, it’s like they are holding the baby of you.”

— Anne Lamott

264. “There is ecstasy in paying attention. You can get into a kind of Wordsworthian openness to the world, where you see in everything the essence of holiness.”

— Anne Lamott

265. “Clutter and mess show us that life is being lived.”

— Anne Lamott

266. “I have a giant ego and terrible self-esteem, so I need to hit the re-set button fairly regularly – to get into presence, and humility, and being right-sized.”

— Anne Lamott

267. “She quoted the Reverend James Forbes as saying, “Nobody gets into heaven without a letter of reference from the poor.”

— Anne Lamott

268. “Anne Lamott’s priest friend Tom, how to get through: “Left foot, right foot, left foot, breathe,” he said. “Right foot, left foot, right foot, breathe.” Salon April 25, 2003.”

— Anne Lamott

269. “I do not love to garden. I love other people’s gardens, and I like cut flowers. I have Astroturf and a whole lot of high-quality plastic flowers stuck in the dirt of our front yard. These are quite a lovely sight and bring to mind many e. e. cummings poems. People used to give me potted plants and trees, and what happened to them is really too horrible to go into here.”

— Anne Lamott

270. “Every woman’s path is difficult, and many mothers were as equipped to raise children as wire monkey mothers. I say that without judgment: It is, sadly, true. An unhealthy mother’s love is withering.”

— Anne Lamott

271. “I am a terrible and lazy Christian. I do not believe that the Bible is the literal word of God. I just skip about a third of it.”

— Anne Lamott

272. “What people somehow forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here.”

— Anne Lamott

273. “Having a baby is like suddenly getting the world’s worst roommate, like having Janis Joplin with a bad hangover and PMS come to stay with you.”

— Anne Lamott

274. “What helps is that we are not all crazy and hopeless on the same day.”

— Anne Lamott

275. “Just don’t pretend you know more about your characters than they do, because you don’t. Stay open to them. It’s teatime and all the dolls are at the table. Listen. It’s that simple.”

— Anne Lamott

276. “God has smiled on me, He has set me free.” For us to acknowledge that we have been set free from toxic dependency, from crippling obsession or guilt, that we have been graced with the ability finally to forgive someone, is just plain astonishing.”

— Anne Lamott

277. “Trappings and charm wear off, I’ve learned. The book of welcome says, Let people see you. They see that your upper arms are beautiful, soft and clean and warm, and then they will see this about their own, some of the time. It’s called having friends, choosing each other, getting found, being fished out of the rubble. It blows you away, how this wonderful event happened – me in your life, you in mine.”

— Anne Lamott

278. “When hope is not pinned wriggling onto a shiny image or expectation, it sometimes floats forth and opens.”

— Anne Lamott

279. “We can change. People say we can’t, but we do when the stakes or the pain is high enough. And when we do, life can change. It offers more of itself when we agree to give up our busyness.”

— Anne Lamott

280. “Trying to reason with an addict was like trying to blow out a lightbulb.”

— Anne Lamott

281. “A big heart is both a clunky and a delicate thing; it doesn’t protect itself and it doesn’t hide. It stands out, like a baby’s fontanel, where you can see the soul pulse through.”

— Anne Lamott

282. “I did not raise my son, Sam, to celebrate Mother’s Day. I didn’t want him to feel some obligation to buy me pricey lunches or flowers, some annual display of gratitude that you have to grit your teeth and endure.”

— Anne Lamott

283. “There’s freedom in hitting bottom, in seeing that you won’t be able to save or rescue your daughter, her spouse, his parents, or your career, relief in admitting you’ve reached the place of great unknowing. This is where restoration can begin, because when you’re still in the state of trying to fix the unfixable, everything bad is engaged: the chatter of your mind, the tension of your physiology, all the trunks and wheel-ons you carry from the past. It’s exhausting, crazy-making.”

— Anne Lamott

284. “Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist’s true friend.”

— Anne Lamott

285. “My heart was broken and my head was just barely inhabitable.”

— Anne Lamott

286. “Grace is having a commitment to- or at least an acceptance of- being ineffective and foolish. That our bottled charm is the main roadblock to drinking that clear cool glass of love.”

— Anne Lamott

287. “I get thirsty people glasses of water, even if that thirsty person is just me.”

— Anne Lamott

288. “You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.”

— Anne Lamott

289. “More than any other sentence I have ever come across, I love Ram Dass’s line that when all is said and done, we are all just walking each other home.”

— Anne Lamott

290. “When we are stunned to the place beyond words, we’re finally starting to get somewhere. It is so much more comfortable to think that we know what it all means, what to expect and how it all hangs together. When we are stunned to the place beyond words, when an aspect of life takes us away from being able to chip away at something until it’s down to a manageable size and then to file it nicely away, when all we can say in response is “Wow,” that’s a prayer.”

— Anne Lamott

291. “I spend most of my time alone, because I so value and thrive in the quiet. Heaven.”

— Anne Lamott

292. “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

293. “I devoured books like a person taking vitamins, afraid that otherwise I would remain this gelatinous narcissist, with no possibility of ever becoming thoughtful, of ever being taken seriously.”

— Anne Lamott

294. “What finally helped was an image from a medieval monk, Brother Lawrence, who saw all of us as trees in winter, with little to give, stripped of leaves and color and growth, whom God loves unconditionally anyway. My priest friend Margaret, who works with the aged and who shared this image with me, wanted me to see that even though these old people are no longer useful in any traditional meaning of the word, they are there to be loved unconditionally, like trees in the winter. When.”

— Anne Lamott

295. “One line of dialogue that rings true reveals character in a way that pages of description can’t.”

— Anne Lamott

296. “One of the gifts of being a writer is that it gives you an excuse to do things, to go places and explore. Another is that writing motivates you to look closely at life, at life as it lurches by and tramps around.”

— Anne Lamott

297. “He got me a cup of tea with honey, toast with honey, yogurt with honey, like I was John the Baptist with the flu.”

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

299. “You know how I always say that laughter is carbonated holiness? Well, Robin was the ultimate proof of that, and bubbles are spirit made visible.”

— Anne Lamott

300. “Kindness toward others and radical kindness to ourselves buy us a shot at a warm and generous heart, which is the greatest prize of all.”

— Anne Lamott