Top 500 Anne Lamott Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “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

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

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

404. “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

405. “I think drugs are part of the magical possibilities of youth and I wouldn’t be here if I had continued with it.”

— Anne Lamott

406. “The Dalai Lama said that “religion is like going out to dinner with friends. Everyone may order something different, but everyone can still sit at the same table.”

— Anne Lamott

407. “Learning to love back is the hardest part of being alive.”

— Anne Lamott

408. “Can you imagine the hopelessness of trying to live a spiritual life when you’re secretly looking up at the skies not for illumination or direction, but to gauge, miserably, the odds of rain?”

— Anne Lamott

409. “Now, if you ask me, what’s going on is that we’re all up to here in it, and probably the most important thing is that we not yell at one another.”

— Anne Lamott

410. “The pain does grow less acute, but the insidious palace lie that we will get over crushing loses means that our emotional GPS can never find true north, as it is based on maps that no longer mention the most important places we have been to. page 40.”

— Anne Lamott

411. “Vonnegut said, “When I write, I feel like an armless legless man with a crayon in his mouth.” So.”

— Anne Lamott

412. “Toni Morrison said, “The function of freedom is to free someone else,” and if you are no longer wracked or in bondage to a person or a way of life, tell your story.”

— Anne Lamott

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

— Anne Lamott

414. “Evangelical Christians and I can sit down and talk one on one about how much we love Jesus, and yet I’m not carried in Christian bookstores.”

— Anne Lamott

415. “Looking back on the God my friend believed in, he seems a little erratic, not entirely unlike her father – God as borderline personality.”

— Anne Lamott

416. “Frederick Buechner is one of my favorite writers. The Eyes of the Heart is beautiful and wise, full of insight, charm, and tenderness.”

— Anne Lamott

417. “My mother was a not-too-devoted atheist. She went to Episcopal church on Christmas Eve every year, and that was mostly it.”

— Anne Lamott

418. “The real payoff is the writing itself, that a day when you have gotten your work done is a good day, that total dedication is the point.”

— Anne Lamott

419. “There is nothing you can buy, achieve, own, or rent that can fill up that hunger inside for a sense of fulfillment and wonder.”

— Anne Lamott

420. “Look at us,” he said. His speech was difficult to understand, thick and slow as a warped record. His two friends in the picture had Down’s syndrome. All three of them looked extremely pleased with themselves. I admired the picture and then handed it back to him. He stopped, so I stopped, too. He pointed to his own image. “That,” he said, “is one cool man.”

— Anne Lamott

421. “When I was young, I used to be so jealous of other girls that it crippled me.”

— Anne Lamott

422. “The whistle is always waiting to be blown, and in some ways, it gets me to do better work.”

— Anne Lamott

423. “Some aching beauty comes with huge loss, although maybe not right away, when it would be helpful. Life is a very powerful force, despite the constant discouragement. So if you are a person with connections to life, a few tendrils eventually break through the sidewalk of loss, and you notice them, maybe space out studying them for a few moments, or maybe they tickle you into movement and response, if only because you have to scratch your nose.”

— Anne Lamott

424. “I was learning the secrets of life: that you could become the woman you’d dared to dream of being, but to do so you were going to have to fall in love with your own crazy, ruined self.”

— Anne Lamott

425. “Like the Buddha and Jesus, who knew they couldn’t control our lives, but could infuse lives with their selves, we have been graced with a few people.”

— Anne Lamott

426. “Alone, we are doomed, but by the same token, we’ve learned that people are impossible, even the ones we love most – especially the ones we love most: they’re damaged, prickly and set in their ways.”

— Anne Lamott

427. “Believing isn’t the hard part; waiting on God is. So I stuck with it and prayed impatiently for patience, and to stop feeling disgusted by myself, and to believe for a few moments that God, just a bit busy with other suffering in the world, actually cared about one menopausal white woman on a binge.”

— Anne Lamott

428. “You simply keep putting down one damn word after the other, as you hear them, as they come to you. You can either set brick as a laborer or as an artist.”

— Anne Lamott

429. “What fills us is real, sweet, dopey, funny life.”

— Anne Lamott

430. “The good news is that if you don’t seal up your heart with caulking compound, and instead stay permeable, people stay alive inside you, and maybe outside you, too, forever. This.”

— Anne Lamott

431. “A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way.”

— Anne Lamott

432. “The redwoods are like organ pipes, playing silent chords.”

— Anne Lamott

433. “All you can give us is what life is about from your point of view. You are not going to be able to give us the plans to the submarine. Life is not a submarine. There are no plans.”

— Anne Lamott

434. “For too long, and despite what people told me, I had fallen for what the culture said about beauty, youth, features, heights, weights, hair textures, upper arms.”

— Anne Lamott

435. “Help” is a prayer that is always answered. It doesn’t matter how you pray – with your head bowed in silence, or crying out in grief, or dancing. Churches are good for prayer, but so are garages and cars and mountains and showers and dance floors. Years ago I wrote an essay that began, “Some people think that God is in the details, but I have come to believe that God is in the bathroom.”

— Anne Lamott

436. “I do not have deep theological understanding or opinion, but I do not read the Bible as the literal word of God.”

— Anne Lamott

437. “We’re bugs struggling in the river, brightly visible to the trout below.”

— Anne Lamott

438. “My main problem is that over and over again, I try to get all my characters to say stuff that I think is so witty or erudite you know, so that everybody will go.”

— Anne Lamott

439. “It is hard to remember that you are a cherished spiritual being when you’re burping up apple fritters and Cheetos.”

— Anne Lamott

440. “You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander.”

— Anne Lamott

441. “My natural tendency is to complicate everything – and then to spray words and ideas onto everything afterwards. I’ve had to develop the habit of keeping things simple.”

— Anne Lamott

442. “It’s funny where we look for salvation, and where we actually find it.”

— Anne Lamott

443. “Science, art, community, and nature make manifest that bad will or mistakes can lead to progress, like Bob Ross on his show The Joy of Painting reminding us that when we make big mistakes on canvas, we can turn them into birds – “Yeah, they’re birds now!”

— Anne Lamott

444. “My mother’s eyes were large and brown, like my son’s, but unlike Sam’s, they were always frantic, like a hummingbird who can’t quite find the flower but keeps jabbing around.”

— Anne Lamott

445. “Mark Twain said that Adam was the only man who, when he said a good thing, knew that nobody had said it before.”

— Anne Lamott

446. “Rumi: “Where there is ruin, there is hope for a treasure.”

— Anne Lamott

447. “We have to make ourselves available to one another, or we can’t experience goodness. It’s not so much us seeking God, tracking Her down with a butterfly net; it’s agreeing to be found. The Old Girl reaches out to everyone and wants to include us in this beautiful, weird, sometimes anguished life. All people: go figure.”

— Anne Lamott

448. “Your job is to present clearly your viewpoint, your line of vision. Your job is to see people as they really are, and to do this, you have to know who you are in the most compassionate possible sense.”

— Anne Lamott

449. “Will call him a she when the pee-pee is gone. Says “Brave is to endure stares, jeers, prejudice. He won’t.”

— Anne Lamott

450. “Everything takes me forever. It’s all lurch, flail. I hope that is good news to you writers.”

— Anne Lamott