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

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

— Anne Lamott

353. “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

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

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

— Anne Lamott

358. “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

359. “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

360. “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

361. “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

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

— Anne Lamott

363. “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

364. “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

365. “Mercy is radical kindness. Mercy means offering or being offered aid in desperate straits. Mercy is not deserved. It involves absolving the unabsolvable, forgiving the unforgivable. Mercy brings us to the miracle of apology, given and accepted, to unashamed humility when we have erred or forgotten.”

— Anne Lamott

366. “So how on earth can I bring a child into the world, knowing that such sorrow lies ahead, that it is such a large part of what it means to be human? I’m not sure. That’s my answer: I’m not sure.”

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

369. “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

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

— Anne Lamott

371. “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

372. “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

373. “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

374. “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

375. “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

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

— Anne Lamott

377. “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

378. “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

379. “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

380. “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

381. “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

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. “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

384. “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

385. “All these years I fell for the great palace lie that grief should be gotten over as quickly as possible and as privately. But what I’ve discovered since is that lifelong fear of grief keeps us in a barren, isolated place and that only grieving can heal grief; the passage of time will lessen the acuteness, but time alone, without the direct experience of grief, will not heal it.”

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

388. “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

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. “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

391. “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

392. “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

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

— Anne Lamott

394. “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

395. “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

396. “The reality is that most of us lived our first decades feeling welcome only when certain conditions applied: we felt safe and embraced only when the parental units were getting along, when we were on our best behavior, doing well in school, not causing problems, and had as few needs as possible. If you needed more from them, best of luck.”

— Anne Lamott

397. “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

398. “Forgiveness and mercy mean that, bit by bit, you begin to outshine the resentment.”

— Anne Lamott

399. “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

400. “But in surrender you have won.”

— Anne Lamott