Top 500 Anne Lamott Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

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

— Anne Lamott

304. “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

305. “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

306. “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

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

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

310. “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

311. “There is ecstasy in paying attention.”

— Anne Lamott

312. “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

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

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

315. “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

316. “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

317. “Certainty is missing the point entirely.”

— Anne Lamott

318. “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

319. “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

320. “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

321. “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

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

— Anne Lamott

323. “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

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

— Anne Lamott

325. “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

326. “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

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

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

329. “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

330. “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

331. “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

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

— Anne Lamott

333. “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

334. “What an incredible drug fear is.”

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

337. “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

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

— 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. “On writer’s block: The word block suggests that you are constipated or stuck, when the truth is that you’re empty.”

— Anne Lamott

341. “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

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

— Anne Lamott

343. “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

344. “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

345. “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

346. “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

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

— Anne Lamott

348. “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

349. “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

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

— Anne Lamott