Anne Lamott Quotes
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301. “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

302. “My family tends to be pretty alcoholic and drug-addicted.”

— Anne Lamott

303. “If you fixate on the big picture, the whole shebang, the overview, you miss the stitching.”

— Anne Lamott

304. “Maybe it’s wishful thinking, this snaggly faith of mine, or maybe it’s Miles Davis saying, Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there.”

— Anne Lamott

305. “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

306. “No one is more sentimentalized in America than mothers on Mother’s Day, but no one is more often blamed for the culture’s bad people and behavior.”

— Anne Lamott

307. “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

308. “This is a difficult country to look too different in – the United States of Advertising, as Paul Krassner puts it – and if you are too skinny or too tall or dark or weird or short or frizzy or homely or poor or nearsighted, you get crucified. I did. But.”

— Anne Lamott

309. “Perfectionism means that you try not to leave so much mess to clean up. But clutter and mess show us that life is being lived.”

— Anne Lamott

310. “We live stitch by stitch, when we’re lucky. If you fixate on the big picture, the whole shebang, the overview, you miss the stitching.”

— Anne Lamott

311. “What an incredible drug fear is.”

— Anne Lamott

312. “I worry that Jesus drinks himself to sleep when he hears me talk like this.”

— Anne Lamott

313. “I liked those ladies! They were helpers, and they danced.? These are the words I want on my gravestone: that I was a helper, and that I danced.”

— Anne Lamott

314. “You have to make mistakes to find out who you aren’t.”

— Anne Lamott

315. “When we agree to being part of something bigger than our own wired, fixated minds, we are saved.”

— Anne Lamott

316. “I believe in listening to what calls you from your heart and your spirit and if you do it badly, like learning to dance, you do it badly or you’re going to kick yourself when you grow old and you meant to do it.”

— Anne Lamott

317. “I wish there were shortcuts to wisdom and self-knowledge: cuter abysses or three-day spa wilderness experiences. Sadly, it doesn’t work that way. I so resent this.”

— Anne Lamott

318. “Write as if your parents are dead.”

— Anne Lamott

319. “The basic formula for drama is setup, buildup, payoff – just like a joke. The.”

— Anne Lamott

320. “I could become like that dyslexic agnostic in the old joke – the one who lies in bed and tries to figure out if his dog exists.”

— Anne Lamott

321. “I’ve always understood that meditation had to be part of – or was part of the natural path and so I’ve always sort of dabbled in it.”

— Anne Lamott

322. “There is flow everywhere in nature – glaciers are just rivers that are moving really, really slowly – so how could there not be flow in each of.”

— Anne Lamott

323. “Frequently, as so many poets and psalmists and songwriters have said, the invisible shift happens through the broken places.”

— Anne Lamott

324. “I kept asking God for help, and after a while I realized something – that Josh was not enjoying this either. He was just trying to take care of himself, and I made the radical decision to let him off the hook.”

— Anne Lamott

325. “Grace arrived, like the big, loopy stitches with which a grandmotherly stranger might baste your hem temporarily.”

— Anne Lamott

326. “You weren’t born a person of cringe and contraction. You were born as energy, as life, made of the same stuff as stars, blossoms, breezes. You learned contraction to survive, but that was then. You have paid through the nose – paid but good. It is now your turn to reap.”

— Anne Lamott

327. “Sometimes I think God loves the ones who most desperately ache and are most desperately lost – his or her wildest, most messed-up children – the way you’d ache and love a screwed-up rebel daughter in juvenile hall.”

— Anne Lamott

328. “There is cracks, cracks, in everything, that’s how the light gets in.′ I had cracks but not the hope.”

— Anne Lamott

329. “Left to my own devices, my first inclination is to mess in other people’s lives. I secretly believe my whole family, and really the whole world, is my responsibility.”

— Anne Lamott

330. “I see that children fill the existential hollowness many people feel; that when we have children, we know they will need us, and maybe love us, but we don’t have a clue how hard it is going to be.”

— Anne Lamott

331. “Sin is not the adult bookstore on the corner. It is the hard heart, the lack of generosity, and all the isms, racism and sexism and so forth. But is there a crack where a ribbon of light might get in, might sneak past all the roadblocks and piles of stones, mental and emotional and cultural? We.”

— Anne Lamott

332. “There are these people who keep taking you in and feeding you and loving you and making the world a tiny bit safer than it feels. People have community and family, but existentially we are deeply isolated.”

— Anne Lamott

333. “If your wife locks you out of the house, you don’t have a problem with your door.”

— Anne Lamott

334. “I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all it is cracked up to be. But writing is.”

— Anne Lamott

335. “These are pictures of the people in my family where we look like the most awkward and desperate folk you ever saw, poster children for the human condition.”

— Anne Lamott

336. “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

337. “These days cry out, as never before, for us to pay attention, so we can move through them and get our joy and pride back.”

— Anne Lamott

338. “When you’re kind to people, and you pay attention, you make a field of comfort around them, and you get it back – the Golden Rule meets the Law of Karma meets Murphy’s Law.”

— Anne Lamott

339. “Sometimes it feels like God has reached down and touched me, blessed me a thousand times over, and sometimes it all feels like a mean joke, like God’s advisers are Muammar Qaddafi and Phyllis Schlafly.”

— Anne Lamott

340. “I would seriously rather be in a long line at the DMV than eat with people I don’t know.”

— Anne Lamott

341. “You can tell if people are following Jesus, because they are fedding the poor, sharing their wealth, and trying to get everyone medical insurance.”

— Anne Lamott

342. “If courage is not there, if the possibility of things getting better is not there, listen a little harder.”

— Anne Lamott

343. “Honesty is not necessarily interesting. I don’t want to hear about your dreams or your acid trips, probably unless you make them really interesting.”

— Anne Lamott

344. “She felt as if the mosaic she had been assembling out of life’s little shards got dumped to the ground, and there was no way to put it back together.”

— Anne Lamott

345. “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

346. “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

347. “My writer friends, and they are legion, do not go around beaming with quiet feelings of contentment. Most of them go around with haunted, abused, surprised looks on their faces, like lab dogs on whom very personal deodorant sprays have been tested.”

— Anne Lamott

348. “I was raised with no religious training or influence. Except the influence was to be a moral and ethical person at the secular level. And to be a peace marcher, an activist for civil rights, peace and justice.”

— Anne Lamott

349. “And what a wonderful relief every so often to know who the enemy is – because in the garden, the enemy is everything: the aphids, the weather, time. And so you pour yourself into it, care so much, and see up close so much birth and growth and beauty and danger and triumph – and then everything dies anyway, right? But you just keep doing it.”

— Anne Lamott

350. “If you asked me, parents were supposed to affect the life of their child in such a way that the child grows up to be responsible, able to participate in life and in community.”

— Anne Lamott