Anne Lamott Quotes

Mothers are supposed to listen and, afterward, to respond with some wisdom and perspective, but thes...

Pay attention to the beauty surrounding you.

My gratitude for good writing is unbounded I'm grateful for it the way I'm grateful for the ocean.

Seeing yourself in print is such an amazing concept: you can get so much attention without having to...

For too long, and despite what people told me, I had fallen for what the culture said about beauty, ...

Your experiences will be yours alone. But truth and best friendship will rarely if ever disappoint y...

I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who...

Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, t...

Everyone is flailing through this life without an owner's manual, with whatever modicum of grace and...

Forgiveness means it finally becomes unimportant that you hit back.

My parents, and librarians along the way, taught me about the space between words; about the margins...

If you don't die of thirst, there are blessings in the desert. You can be pulled into limitlessness,...

There are really places in your heart that you don't know exist until you love a child.

I love readings and my readers, but the din of voices of the audience gives me stage fright, and the...

The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is a...

I wish I had thrown out the bathroom scale at age 16. Weighing yourself every morning is like waking...

Some people won't go the extra mile, and then on their birthday, when no one makes a fuss, they feel...

Laughter is carbonated holiness.

Most of me was glad when my mother died. She was a handful, but not in a cute, festive way. More in ...

As a Christian and a feminist, the most important message I can carry and fight for is the sacrednes...

My idea of absolute happiness is to be in bed on a rainy day, with my blankie, my cat, and my dog.

The earth is rocky and full of roots; it's clay, and it seems doomed and polluted, but you dig littl...

I thought such awful thoughts that I cannot even say them out loud because they would make Jesus wan...

My coming to faith did not start with a leap but rather a series of staggers from what seemed like o...

I think joy and sweetness and affection are a spiritual path. We're here to know God, to love and se...

We must not inflict life on children who will be resented we must not inflict unwanted children on s...

Oh my God, what if you wake up some day, and you're 65, or 75, and you never got your memoir or nove...

If you don't know where to start, remember that every single thing that happened to you is yours and...

I hate how long it takes to feel radical, militantly maternal self-acceptance.

The reason I never give up hope is because everything is so basically hopeless.

The opposite of faith is not doubt: It is certainty. It is madness. You can tell you have created Go...

Tom has been having a difficult patch, and we meet at the church of IKEA as often as possible, becau...

I naively believe that self-love is 80 percent of the solution, that it helps beyond words to take y...

Resentments make even the best of us feel superior.

When we're dealing with the people in our family - no matter how annoying or gross they may be, no m...

My parents, and librarians along the way, taught me about the space between words; about the margins...

Hope begins in the dark the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing t...

Some aching beauty comes with huge loss, although maybe not right away, when it would be helpful. Li...

You will lose someone you can’t live without,and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news i...

Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you're conscious and writing from a place of ins...

How alive am I willing to be?

The first holy truth in God 101 is that men and women of true faith have always had to accept the my...

Two things put me in the spirit to give. One is that I have come to think of everyone with whom I co...

My mother was a not-too-devoted atheist. She went to Episcopal church on Christmas Eve every year, a...

Age has given me the gift of me; it just gave me what I was always longing for, which was to get to ...

No matter how people mess with you or let you down, or how you let yourself down, a good book means ...

...[T]here should be a real sense of your imagination and your memories walking and woolgathering, t...

When you don't have enough or you run out, you feel in your core that the leak has begun and there w...

Think of a fine painter attempting to capture an inner vision beginning with one corner of the canv...

Bananas are great, as I believe them to be the only known cure for existential dread. Also, Mother T...

I accidentally forgot to graduate from college.

Here are the two best prayers I know: 'Help me, help me, help me' and 'Thank you, thank you, thank y...

We can't understand when we're pregnant, or when our siblings are expecting, how profound it is to h...

I was raised with no religious training or influence. Except the influence was to be a moral and eth...

Almost every single thing you hope publication will do for you is a fantasy, a hologram--it's the ea...

You are going to feel like hell if you never write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves in your ...

We stitch together quilts of meaning to keep us warm and safe, with whatever patches of beauty and u...

You have to make mistakes to find out who you aren't. You take the action, and the insight follows: ...

I am not writing to try and convert people to fundamental Christianity. I am just trying to share my...

The worst part about celebrating another birthday is the shock that you're only as well as you are.

There was going to be a spot for me in this joint, the earth, after all. It was never going to be a ...

You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the ...

Writing like this is a little like milking a cow: the milk is so rich and delicious, and the cow is ...

Seeing yourself in print is such an amazing concept: you can get so much attention without having to...

Your problem is how you are going to spend this one and precious life you have been issued. Whether ...

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

Seeing yourself in print is such an amazing concept: you can get so much attention without having to...

‎You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the...

Your problem is how you are going to spend this one odd and precious life you have been issued. Whet...

Rituals are a good signal to your unconscious that it is time to kick in.

All wise people say the same thing that you are deserving of love and that it's all here now ever...

Nothing can be delicious when you are holding your breath.

You get your confidence and intuition back by trusting yourself, by being militantly on your own sid...

You are going to have to give and give and give, or there's no reason for you to be writing. You hav...

Writing takes a combination of sophistication and innocence; it takes conscience, our belief that so...

Bird by bird buddy. Just take it bird by bird.

I want people who write to crash or dive below the surface, where life is so cold and confusing and ...

When people shine a little light on their monster, we find out how similar most of our monsters are.

You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly abo...

You want to avoid at all costs drawing your characters on those that already exist in other works of...

A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way. It's a lie if you make ...

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and i...

E.L. Doctorow said once said that 'Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only ...

All good writers write [terrible first drafts.] This is how they end up with good second drafts and ...

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

You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing ...

But how?" my students ask. "How do you actually do it?" You sit down, I say. You try to sit down at ...

I like to think that Henry James said his classic line, "A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost...

For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that o...

Life is not a submarine.

And then, unbidden, seemingly out of nowhere, a thought or image arrives. Some will float into your ...

If your wife locks you out of the house, you don't have a problem with your door.

Perfectionism means that you try not to leave so much mess to clean up. But clutter and mess show us...

You don't always have to chop with the sword of truth. You can point with it too.

Throughout my childhood I believed that what I thought about was different from what other kids thou...

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

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

But you don't always get what you want;,you get what you get

I honestly think in order to be a writer, you have to learn to be reverent. If not, why are you writ...

If you don't believe in God, it may help to remember this great line of Geneen Roth's: that awarenes...

What if you wake up some day, and you’re 65… and you were just so strung out on perfectionism and pe...