Top 500 Anne Lamott Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

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

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

357. “But you can’t get to any of these truths by sitting in a field smiling beatifically, avoiding your anger and damage and grief. Your anger and damage and grief are the way to the truth. We don’t have much truth to express unless we have gone into those rooms and closets and woods and abysses that we were told not go in to. When we have gone in and looked around for a long while, just breathing and finally taking it in – then we will be able to speak in our own voice and to stay in the present moment. And that moment is home.”

— Anne Lamott

358. “This is who I want to be in the world. This is who I think we are supposed to be, people who help call forth human beings from deep inside hopelessness.”

— Anne Lamott

359. “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

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

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

— Anne Lamott

364. “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

365. “I was waiting for the kind of solution where God reaches down and touches you with his magic wand and all of a sudden I would be fixed, like a broken toaster oven. But this was not the way it happened. Instead, I got one angstrom unit better, day by day.”

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

367. “Periods in the wilderness or desert were not lost time. You might find life, wildflowers, fossils, sources of water. 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

368. “We have all we need to come through. Against all odds, no matter what we’ve lost, no matter what messes we’ve made over time, no matter how dark the night, we offer and are offered kindness, soul, light, and food, which create breath and spaciousness, which create hope, sufficient unto the day.”

— Anne Lamott

369. “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

370. “On the spiritual path, all the dreck and misery is transformed, maybe not that same day, but still transformed into spiritual fuel or insight.”

— Anne Lamott

371. “You are going to love some of your characters because they are you or some facet of you, and you are going to hate some of your characters for the same reason.”

— Anne Lamott

372. “You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the rational mind.”

— Anne Lamott

373. “Talking to the parents of older kids was helpful for me, since parents of kids the same age as yours won’t admit how horrible their children are.”

— Anne Lamott

374. “Age has given me the gift of me, it just gave me what I was always longing for, which was to get to be the woman I’ve already dreamt of being. Which is somebody who can do rest and do hard work and be a really constant companion, a constant tender-hearted wife to myself.”

— Anne Lamott

375. “This is a hard planet, and we’re a vulnerable species. And all I can do is pray: Help. When.”

— Anne Lamott

376. “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

377. “I am skittish about relationships, as most of the marriages I’ve seen up close have been ruinous for one or both parties.”

— Anne Lamott

378. “Sam said to me the other day, “I love you like 20 tyrannosauruses on 20 mountaintops,” and this is the exact same way in which I love him.”

— Anne Lamott

379. “I sat down in the sand, breathless with shame and failure. God, I thought, some defender of the weak. Some freedom fighter: Joan of Arc in sunscreen.”

— Anne Lamott

380. “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

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

384. “I went to Goucher College in Maryland for the best possible reasons – to learn – but then I dropped out at 19 for the best possible reasons – to become a writer.”

— Anne Lamott

385. “I’ve always thought I could use my brain and my heart to jockey everyone around to the good. But life is not jockeyable. When you try, you make people infinitely crazier than they already were, including or especially yourself.”

— Anne Lamott

386. “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

387. “I don’t have very sophisticated taste in music. I listen to a lot of folk music. I like reggae.”

— Anne Lamott

388. “Novels ought to have hope; at least, American novels ought to have hope. French novels don’t need to. We mostly win wars, they lose them. Of course, they did hide more Jews than many other countries, and this is a form of winning.”

— Anne Lamott

389. “Now she and I sit together in her room and eat chocolate, and I tell her that in a very long time when we both to go heaven, we should try to get chairs next to each other, close to the dessert table.”

— Anne Lamott

390. “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

391. “The problem with God – or at any rate, one of the top five most annoying things about God – is that he or she rarely answers right away.”

— Anne Lamott

392. “Hallelujah that in spite of it all, there is love, there is singing, nature, laughing, mercy.”

— Anne Lamott

393. “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

394. “I honestly think that in order to be a writer you have to learn to be reverent. If not, why are you writing? Why are you here?”

— Anne Lamott

395. “I naturally prefer the company of people who hold grudges, as long as they are not held against me.”

— Anne Lamott

396. “When you’re conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader.”

— Anne Lamott

397. “It is in many people’s best interest for you not to find yourself, but it only matters that it is in yours, and the whole world’s, to proceed.”

— Anne Lamott

398. “We all know we’re going to die; what’s important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this.”

— Anne Lamott

399. “They always threw their arms around and hugged me while crying our Yiddish endearments. Yet none of them believed in God. They believed in social justice, good works, Israel, and Bette Midler. I was nearly thirty before I met a religious Jew.”

— Anne Lamott

400. “She lived in fear of ifonic endings.”

— Anne Lamott