Anne Lamott Quotes

I never had a particularly strong craving to procreate, except for earlier fantasies of wanting to be Marmee in Little Women. ~ Anne Lamott

It's always the same old problem: how to find ourselves in the great yammering of ego and tragedy and discomfort and obsession with everyone else's destinies. ~ Anne Lamott

He told me about his monster. His sounded just like mine without quite so much mascara. When people shine a little light on their monster, we find out how similar most of our monsters are. ~ Anne Lamott

The depth of the feeling continued to surprise and threaten me, but each time it hit again and I bore it ... I would discover that it hadn't washed me away. ~ Anne Lamott

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

My lifelong and core belief, right after the conviction that I was defective, mildly annoying, and better than everyone else was that my help was helpful. ~ Anne Lamott

As well as we know our grown children and relatives, we don't know how much energy they have to put into simply keeping their lives together at all. ~ Anne Lamott

And if minor characters show an inclination to become major characters … you at least give them a shot at it, because … just as in the real world it may take you many years to find out that the stranger you talked to once for half an hour in the railroad station may have done more to point you to where your true homeland lies than your priest or your best friend or even your psychiatrist. ~ Anne Lamott

At our most primitive we are storytellers and dancers. ~ Anne Lamott

Getting all your addictions under control is like trying to put an octopus to bed ~ Anne Lamott

And my fear of failure has been lifelong and deep. If you are what you do- and I think my parents may have accidentally given me this idea- and you do poorly, what then? It's over; you're wiped out. All those prophecies you heard in the dark have come true, and people can see the real you, see what a schmendrick you are, what a fraud. ~ Anne Lamott

One line of dialogue that rings true reveals character in a way that pages of description can't. ~ Anne Lamott

It's intrusive for grandparents to think they're in charge. It's manipulative. Also, it's self-destructive, since if the parents have to resist you, you won't get your mitts on the kid as often. ~ Anne Lamott

I was raised by my parents to believe that you had a moral obligation to try and help save the world. ~ Anne Lamott

Now. Maybe you think it is arrogant or self centered, or ridiculous for me to believe that God bothered to wiggle a cheap bolt out of my new used car because he or she needed to keep me away for a few days until just the moment when my old friend most needed me to help her mother move into whatever comes next. Maybe nothing conscious helped to stall me so that I would be there when I could be most useful. Or maybe it did. I'll never know for sure. And anyway, it doesn't really matter. ~ Anne Lamott

At five that night, I went back to the market and bought three sixteen-ounce Rainier Ales. I bounced back to my house, Mary Lou Retton-like, sipped the first ale, took the Valium, smoked a joint, drank the second ale, took another Valium, listened to "Into the Mystic" ten times, drank the third Ale, too the Valium and the Halcion, and discovered two unhappy thoughts. One was it was only seven o'clock. The second was that I was wide awake. ~ Anne Lamott

The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little. But we do. We have so much we want to say and figure out. ~ Anne Lamott

But I have to believe that Jesus prefers honesty to anything else. I was saying, "Here's who I am," and that is where most improvement has to begin. ~ Anne Lamott

We learn from pain that some of the things we thought were castles turn out to be prisons, and we desperately want out, but even though we built them, we can't find the door. Yet maybe if you ask God for help in knowing which direction to face, you'll have a moment of intuition. Maybe you'll see at least one next right step you can take. ~ Anne Lamott

One thing about having a baby is that each step of the way you simply cannot imagine loving him any more than you already do, because you are bursting with love, loving as much as you are humanly capable of- and then you do, you love him even more. ~ Anne Lamott

The basic formula for drama is setup, buildup, payoff - just like a joke. The ~ Anne Lamott

The welcome book would have taught us that power and signs of status can't save us, that welcome - both offering and receiving - is our source of safety. Various chapters and verses of this book would remind us that we are wanted and even occasionally delighted in, despite the unfortunate truth that we are greedy-grabby, self-referential, indulgent, overly judgmental, and often hysterical. Somehow that book "went missing." Or when the editorial board of bishops pored over the canonical lists from Jerusalem and Alexandria, they arbitrarily nixed the book that states unequivocally that you are wanted, even rejoiced in. ~ Anne Lamott

His art springs out of bubbling underground necessity, as if he's somehow dipping himself into the river that gave him life; he's making dream material visible. ~ Anne Lamott

Tom said either you learn to live with paradox and ambiguity or you'll be 6 years old for the rest of your life. ~ Anne Lamott

I've written six novels and four pieces of nonfiction, so I don't really have a genre these days. ~ Anne Lamott

Anything you say from your heart to God is a prayer. But "why" is rarely a useful question. When Job keeps asking God why he has had such loss and suffering, God says, "You wouldn't understand." I always want to know why, and I almost never have a good answer. ~ Anne Lamott

I happen to be a Christian, but I know that there is one God. People worshipping goodness and love and kindness and truth are worshipping the same God. ~ Anne Lamott

Getting found almost always means being lost for a while. ~ Anne Lamott

All these people keep waxing sentimental about how fabulously well I am doing as a mother, how competent I am, but I feel inside like when you're first learning to put nail polish on your right hand with your left. You can do it, but it doesn't look all that great around the cuticles. ~ Anne Lamott

In the aftermath of loss, we do what we've always done, although we are changed, maybe more afraid. We do what we can, as well as we can. My pastor, Veronica, one Sunday told the story of a sparrow lying in the street with its legs straight up in the air, sweating a little under its feathery arms. A warhorse walks up to the bird and asks, "What on earth are you doing?" The sparrow replies, "I heard the sky was falling, and I wanted to help." The horse laughs a big, loud, sneering horse laugh, and says, "Do you really think you're going to hold back the sky, with those scrawny little legs?" And the sparrow says, "One does what one can." So what can I do? Not much. Mother Teresa said that none of us can do great things, but we can do small things with great love. This reminder has saved me many times. ~ Anne Lamott

I very rarely read the responses to my Salon pieces, because (as you may have noticed) the trolls can be SO evil. So violent in their hostility to me and my work. OK, wait, wait, wait. That's a lie. I do read the responses
and get mesmerized, like cobra hypnosis. But I laugh (mostly) at the trolls, and think about what tiny little weenies they must have. (They seem to be mostly men.) And then ALL these smart, funny people leap to my defense, which is medicine, and fills me with love and thankfulness. ~ Anne Lamott

When people don't have free access to books, then communities are like radios without batteries. ~ Anne Lamott

It is most comfortable to be invisible, to observe life from a distance, at one with our own intoxicating superior thoughts. But comfort and isolation are not where the surprises are. They are not where hope is. ~ Anne Lamott

There are few experiences as depressing as that anxious barren state known as writer's block, where you sit staring at your blank page like a cadaver, feeling your mind congeal, feeling you talent run down your leg and into your sock. ~ Anne Lamott

I'm much calmer as I get older, but I'm still just as capable of getting that strung-out stressed-out feeling of mental and spiritual unwellness. ~ Anne Lamott

Or you might shout at the top of your lungs or whisper into your sleeve, "I hate you, God." That is a prayer too, because it is real, it is truth, and maybe it is the first sincere thought you've had in months. ~ Anne Lamott

I went around saying for a long time that I am not one of those Christians who is heavily into forgiveness
that I am one of the other kind. But even though it was funny, and actually true, it started to be too painful to stay this way. They say we are not punished for the sin but by the sin, and I began to feel punished by my unwillingness to forgive. ~ Anne Lamott

You can safely assume you've remade God in your own image when it turns out God hates the same people you do. Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird ~ Janis Bragan Balda

What you're looking for is already inside you. You've heard this before, but the holy thing inside you really is that which causes you to seek it. You can't buy it, lease it, rent it, date it, or apply for it. The best job in the world can't give it to you. Neither can succes, or fame, or financial security - besides which, there ain't no such thing. ~ Anne Lamott

He got me a cup of tea with honey, toast with honey, yogurt with honey, like I was John the Baptist with the flu. ~ Anne Lamott

I naturally prefer the company of people who hold grudges, as long as they are not held against me. ~ Anne Lamott

When you are on the knife's edge - when nobody knows exactly what is going to happen next, only that it will be worse - you take in today. ~ Anne Lamott

Write as if your parents are dead. ~ Anne Lamott

I don't remember who said this, but there really are places in the heart you don't even know exist until you love a child. ~ Anne Lamott

These lines of D.H. Lawrence are taped to the wall of my office:

"What is the knocking?
What is the knocking at the door in the night?
It is somebody wants to do us harm.

No, no, it is the three strange angels.
Admit them, admit them."

I under[stand] that failure is surely one of these strange angels. ~ Anne Lamott

A nun I know once told me she kept begging God to take her character defects away from her. After years of this prayer, God finally got back to her: I'm not going to take anything away from you, you have to give it to Me. ~ Anne Lamott

Just don't pretend you know more about your characters than they do, because you don't. Stay open to them. It's teatime and all the dolls are at the table. Listen. It's that simple. ~ Anne Lamott

What an incredible drug fear is. ~ Anne Lamott

The difference between a writer who toughs it out and one who doesn't is that you push through the parts where you know that you've just written seven pages when all you're looking for is one paragraph. ~ Anne Lamott

He had the time to hear, like a person who believed there was someone alive beneath the rubble of herself, who heard the soft sounds she could still make from the broken parts that had waited decades to be missed. ~ Anne Lamott

Writing is about hypnotizing yourself into believing in yourself, getting some work done, then unhypnotizing yourself and going over the material coldly. ~ Anne Lamott

If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. Otherwise, you'll just be rearranging furniture in rooms you've already been in. ~ Anne Lamott

The mix in our rooms is so touching: the clutter and the cracks in the wall belie a bleakness or brokenness in our lives; while photos and a few rare objects show our pride, our rare shining moments ... these rooms are future ruins ~ Anne Lamott

Talking to the parents of older kids was helpful for me, since the parents of kids the same age as yours won't admit how horrible their children are ... you can either practice being right or practice being kind. Screaming in the car helped. [p. 94] ~ Anne Lamott

Once an old woman at my church said the secret is that God loves us exactly the way we are and that he loves us too much to let us stay like this, and I'm just trying to trust that. ~ Anne Lamott

Prayer means that, in some unique way, we believe we're invited into a relationship with someone who hears us when we speak in silence. ~ Anne Lamott

Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. 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. He or she will recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of. ~ Anne Lamott

The redwoods are like organ pipes, playing silent chords. ~ Anne Lamott

They taught us that extending ourselves to others would help us stay sober and sane. But they also wanted us to extend ourselves to our own horrible selves, get ourselves a lovely cup of tea. It was and is the hardest work ever. ~ Anne Lamott

And she is going to dance, dance hungry, dance full, dance each cold astonishing moment, now when she is young and again when she is old. ~ Anne Lamott

She lived in fear of ifonic endings. (91) ~ Anne Lamott

By the end I was deteriorating faster than I could lower my standards. ~ Anne Lamott

This is the Easter message, that awakening is possible, to the goodness of God, the sacredness of human life, the sisterhood and brotherhood of all. ~ Anne Lamott

I write everything as a wake-up call to myself and others, to anyone who may have gotten tired of hitting the snooze button. ~ Anne Lamott

It speaks of such integrity to refuse to pretend that you're doing well just to help other people deal with the fact that sometimes we face an impossible loss. ~ Anne Lamott

Look, if you don't have a bad attitude and lots of things wrong with you, no serious person is going to be interested. If you feel scared, outraged, confused most of the time, come on over. Have a seat. ~ Anne Lamott

And that almost everyone was struggling to wake up, to be loved, and not feel so afraid all the time. That's what the cars, degrees, booze, and drugs were about. ~ Anne Lamott

Laughter is deliverance, bubbly salvation. ~ Anne Lamott

P 264: Elizabeth talking to Rosie re Sharon leaving
Try to be a good sport, baby. Sharon feels as bad as you do. It's all right for you to be mad, but ... try to be as good a sport as you can. I'll tell you. It's a run-of-the-mill shitty thing. Life is full of them. And it is ALWAYS feels better to be kind. ~ Anne Lamott

Every single one of us at birth is given an emotional acre all our own. ~ Anne Lamott

God can't clean the house of you when you're still in it. ~ Anne Lamott

The last song was so deep and raw and pure that I could not escape. It was as if the people were singing in between the notes, weeping and joyful at the same time, and I felt like their voices or something was rocking me in its bosom, holding me like a scared kid, and I opened up to that feeling-and it washed over me. ~ Anne Lamott

I spend most of my time alone, because I so value and thrive in the quiet. Heaven. ~ Anne Lamott

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. Risk freeing someone else. Not everyone will be glad that you did. Members of your family and other critics may wish you had kept your secrets. Oh, well, what are you going to do? ~ Anne Lamott

Forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a better past. ~ Anne Lamott

[Her] work taught me that you could be all the traditional feminine things
a mother, a lover, a listener, a nurturer
and you could also be critically astute and radical and have a minority opinion that was profoundly moral. ~ Anne Lamott

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

I understood that the man I was calling for could never ever come back. Because I understood that the man that I was calling for was dead. ~ Anne Lamott

For me, being a writer is not an altered state. It's very ponderous, and very - it's like being a shoemaker. ~ Anne Lamott

I am an Aries. Although I do not believe in astrology, I think this is exactly the right sign to have been born under. ~ Anne Lamott

Everyone has come to understand that unconditional love is a reality, but with as shelf life of about eight to ten seconds. [p. 110] ~ Anne Lamott

I am going to notice the lights of the earth, the sun and the moon and the stars, the lights of our candles as we march, the lights with which spring teases us, the light that is already present. ~ Anne Lamott

Some people wanted to get rich or famous, but my friends and I wanted to get real. We wanted to get deep. (Also, I suppose, we wanted to get laid.) ~ Anne Lamott

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

I decided to go to the beach at San Quentin, and practice living as if today was one of the precious few left to me. What a concept. ~ Anne Lamott

Human lives are hard, even those of health and privilege, and don't make much sense. This is the message of the Book of Job: Any snappy explanation of suffering you come up with will be horseshit. ~ Anne Lamott

If you want to feel loving, I coached myself, do something loving. This is basic soul care. ~ Anne Lamott

When we are stunned to the place beyond words, we're finally starting to get somewhere. It is so much more comfortable to think that we know what it all means, what to expect and how it all hangs together. When we are stunned to the place beyond words, when an aspect of life takes us away from being able to chip away at something until it's down to a manageable size and then to file it nicely away, when all we can say in response is "Wow," that's a prayer. ~ Anne Lamott

Find out what each character cares most in the world because then you will have discovered what's at stake. ~ Anne Lamott

I remind myself nearly every day of something that a doctor told me six months before my friend Pammy died. This was a doctor who always gave me straight answers. When I called on this one particular night, I was hoping she could put a positive slant on some distressing developments. She couldn't, but she said something that changed my life. "Watch her carefully right now," she said, "because she's teaching you how to live".
I remind myself of this when I cannot get any work done: to live as if I am dying, because the truth is we are all terminal on this bus. To live as if we are dying gives us a chance to experience some real presence. ~ Anne Lamott

But be careful: if your intuition says that your story sucks, make sure it really is your intuition and not your mother. ~ Anne Lamott

I wish I had thrown out the bathroom scale at age 16. Weighing yourself every morning is like waking up and asking Dick Cheney to validate your sense of inner worth. ~ Anne Lamott

Hope, as Chesterton said, is the power of being cheerful in circumstances that we know to be desperate. Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor, because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong. It is no wonder if we sometimes tend to take ourselves perhaps a bit too seriously. So ~ Anne Lamott

They got to be so conceited because they were Catholics. ~ Anne Lamott

Sometimes you run into someone, regardless of age or sex, whom you know absolutely to be an independently operating part of the Whole that goes on all the time inside yourself, and the eye-motes go click and you hear the tribal tones of voice resonate, and there it is - you recognize them. ~ Anne Lamott

Since you can't heal your own sick mind with your own sick mind, I needed to consult somebody else's sick mind. ~ Anne Lamott

We cheated, you and me, and someone noticed. I noticed you; someone else noticed me. It hurts us. That's not so bad. So many people cheat. Everywhere on every level. Everyone's cheated. I'm just saying that you don't need to see yourself as a cheater. Because that's not who you are. You're someone who cheated. There's a difference, and you should try to get that difference, or that's who you'll grow up to be. ~ Anne Lamott

I'm not suggesting that you want to be an author who tells a story in order to teach a moral or deliver a message. If you have a message, as Samuel Goldwyn said, send a telegram. ~ Anne Lamott

Nothing heals us like letting people know our scariest parts: When people listen to you cry and lament, and look at you with love, it's like they are holding the baby of you. ~ Anne Lamott

Radical self-care is what we've been longing for, desperate for, our entire lives-friendship with our own hearts. ~ Anne Lamott