Top 500 Anne Lamott Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “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

302. “Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don’t drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor’s yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper.”

— Anne Lamott

303. “Writing involves seeing people suffer and, as Robert Stone once put it, finding some meaning therein. But you can’t do that if you’re not respectful. If you look at people and just see sloppy clothes or rich clothes, you’re going to get them wrong.”

— Anne Lamott

304. “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

305. “But it was the singing that pulled me in and split me wide open.”

— Anne Lamott

306. “Listen to your broccoli and it will tell you how to eat it.”

— Anne Lamott

307. “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

308. “They cramp around our wounds – the pain from our childhood, the losses and disappointments of adulthood, the humiliations suffered in both – to keep us from getting hurt in the same place again, to keep foreign substances out. So those wounds never have a chance to heal. Perfectionism is one way our muscles cramp. In some cases we don’t even know that the wounds and the cramping are there, but both limit us.”

— Anne Lamott

309. “My three prayers are variations on Help, Thanks, Wow. That’s all I’ll ever need, besides the silence, the pain, and the pause sufficient for me to stop, close my eyes, and turn inward.”

— Anne Lamott

310. “Mine was a patchwork God, sewn together from bits of rag and ribbon, Eastern and Western, pagan and Hebrew, everything but the kitchen sink and Jesus.”

— Anne Lamott

311. “Why couldn’t Jesus command us to obsess over everything, to try to control and manipulate people, to try not to breathe at all, or to pay attention, stomp away to brood when people annoy us, and then eat a big bag of Hershey’s Kisses in bed?”

— Anne Lamott

312. “I was raised in a family where none of us ever raised a voice, so there was no room to express feelings of rage or even unabashed joy – a little bashed joy, here or there, or being mildly disgruntled.”

— Anne Lamott

313. “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

314. “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

315. “I suddenly have two stomachs – a regular tummy and another one below that, which I call the subcontinent. This older body is both amazingly healthy and a big disappointment.”

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

317. “I have a very dark sense of humor. I swear. I have a very playful relationship with Jesus.”

— Anne Lamott

318. “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

319. “Thurber was right when he said, “You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backwards.”

— Anne Lamott

320. “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

321. “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

322. “The thing about light is that it really isn’t yours; it’s what you gather and shine back. And it gets more power from reflectiveness; if you sit still and take it in, it fills your cup, and then you can give it off yourself.”

— Anne Lamott

323. “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

324. “Writing takes a combination of sophistication and innocence; it takes conscience, our belief that something is beautiful because it is right.”

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

326. “Anything that leaves you more fearful, more isolated, more disconnected from other people, more full of judgment or self-hatred, is not of God, does not follow the Rule of Love – and you should stop doing it.”

— Anne Lamott

327. “There is ecstasy in paying attention.”

— Anne Lamott

328. “I cry intermittently, like a summer rain. I don’t feel racked by the crying; in fact, it hydrates me. Then rage wells up in me, and I want to take a crowbar to all the cars in the neighborhood.”

— Anne Lamott

329. “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

330. “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

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. “My father was a writer, so I grew up writing and reading and I was really encouraged by him.”

— Anne Lamott

333. “But where do we even start on the daily walk of restoration and awakening? We start where we are. We find God in our human lives, and that includes the suffering. I get thirsty people glasses of water, even if that thirsty person is just me.”

— Anne Lamott

334. “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

335. “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

336. “Certainty is missing the point entirely.”

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

338. “Jealousy has always been my cross, the weakness and woundedness in me that has most often caused me to feel ugly and unlovable, like the Bad Seed.”

— Anne Lamott

339. “Mothering has been the richest experience of my life, but I am still opposed to Mother’s Day. It perpetuates the dangerous idea that all parents are somehow superior to non-parents.”

— Anne Lamott

340. “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

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

— Anne Lamott

342. “Your experiences will be yours alone. But truth and best friendship will rarely if ever disappoint you.”

— Anne Lamott

343. “We’re out there somewhere between the known and the unknown, trying to reel in both for a closer look.”

— Anne Lamott

344. “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

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

— Anne Lamott

346. “Mothers are supposed to listen and, afterward, to respond with some wisdom and perspective, but these things were not my mother’s strong suit.”

— Anne Lamott

347. “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

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

— Anne Lamott

349. “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

350. “What an incredible drug fear is.”

— Anne Lamott