Lamott Quotes & Sayings

Robert Burns said it best: Life is but a day at most. — Anne Lamott

The first holy truth in God 101 is that men and women of true faith have always had to accept the mystery of God's identity and love and ways. I hate that, but it's the truth. — Anne Lamott

Good therapy helps. Good friends help. Pretending that we are doing better than we are doesn't. Shame doesn't. Being heard does. — Anne Lamott

I'll live as well, as deeply, as madly as I can
until I die. — Anne Lamott

Your unconscious can't work when you are breathing down its neck. — Anne Lamott

As for music, my tastes are eclectic. Elvis Costello is my all-time favorite. I listen to a lot of jazz, primarily the great female vocalists, and I am very fond of the late cabaret singer Nancy Lamott. — Laura Lippman

He lost the great big outward thing, the good- looking package, and the real parts endured. They shine through like crazy, the brillian mind and humor, the depth of generosity, the intense blue yes, those beautiful hands. — Anne Lamott

I find most famous Christians to be full of themselves and of prejudice and self-loathing, masquerading as devout religious belief. I find all fundamentalism to be terrifying and very destructive. — Anne Lamott

I mean "God" as shorthand for the Good, for the animating energy of love; for Life, for the light that radiates from within people and from above; in the energies of nature, even in our rough, messy selves. — Anne Lamott

Grief is just so scary ... If we finally begin to cry all those suppressed tears, they will surely wash us away like the Mississippi River. That's what our parents told us. We got sent to our rooms for having huge feelings. In my family, if you cried or got angry, you didn't get dinner. — Anne Lamott

We, too, are shadow and light. We are not supposed to know this, or be all these different facets of humanity, bright and dark. We are raised to be bright and shiny, but there is meaning in the acceptance of our dusky and dappled side, and also in defiance. — Anne Lamott

Rest and laughter are the most spiritual and subversive acts of all. Laugh, rest, slow down. — Anne Lamott

You must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you're a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this. — 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

Our preacher Veronica said recently that this is life's nature: that lives and hearts get broken -- those of people we love, those of people we'll never meet. She said that the world sometimes feels like the waiting room of the emergency ward and that and that we who are more or less OK for now need to take the tenderest possible care of the more wounded people in the waiting room, until the healer comes. You sit with people, she said, you bring them juice and graham crackers. — Anne Lamott

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

I don't have any romantic views of parenting. Every step of the way it's really hard. It's a dangerous world, physically and psychologically. — Anne Lamott

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

Even if only the people in your writing group read your memoirs or stories or novel, even if you only wrote your story so that one day your children would know what life was like when you were a child and you knew the name of every dog in town - still, to have written your version is an honorable thing to have done. — Anne Lamott

Lies cannot nourish or protect you. Only freedom from fear, freedom from lies, can make us beautiful, and keep us safe. — Anne Lamott

Mine was a patchwork God, sewn together from bits of rag and ribbon, Eastern and Western, pagan and Hebrew, everything but the kitchen sink and Jesus. — Anne Lamott

I don't have very sophisticated taste in music. I listen to a lot of folk music. I like reggae. — Anne Lamott

Grace means you're in a different universe from where you had been stuck, when you had absolutely no way to get there on your own. — Anne Lamott

Anyone who survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life. — Anne Lamott

But you can't teach writing, people tell me. And I say, 'Who the hell are you, God's dean of admissions? — Anne Lamott

Wow has a reverberation - wowowowowow - and this pulse can soften us, like the electrical massage an acupuncturist directs to your spine or cramped muscle, which feels like a staple gun, but good. — Anne Lamott

I kept my expectations low, which is one of the secrets of life. — Anne Lamott

If you always dreamed of writing a novel or a memoir, and you used to love to write, and were pretty good at it, will it break your heart if it turns out you never got around to it? If you wake up one day at eighty, will you feel nonchalant that something always took precedence over a daily commitment to discovering your creative spirit? If not
if this very thought fills you with regret
then what are you waiting for? — Anne Lamott

Oh, but my stomach, she is like a waterbed covered in flannel. When I lie on my side in bed, my stomach lies politely beside me, like a puppy. — Anne Lamott

If I have a huge audience, I'd like a bigger audience; maybe slightly a slightly more illustrious audience. — Anne Lamott

You may have gotten into the habit of doubting that voice that was telling you quite clearly what was really going on. It is essential you get that back. — Anne Lamott

Slowly, after dozens of rejection slips and failures and false starts and postponed dreams
what Langston Hughes called dreams deferred
I stepped onto the hallowed ground of being a published novelist, and then, fifteen years later, I started to make real money. — Anne Lamott

How are we going to get through this craziness?' I asked. There was silence for a moment.
'Left foot, right foot, left foot, breathe,' he said. — Anne Lamott

Jealousy has always been my cross, the weakness and woundedness in me that has most often caused me to feel ugly and unlovable, like the Bad Seed. — Anne Lamott

Now, practically even better news than that of short assignments is the idea of shitty first drafts. All good writers write them. — 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

When I was young, I used to be so jealous of other girls that it crippled me. — Anne Lamott

Also, I have a pouch below my belly, whereas I'd always had a thin waist before. Now there's this situation down there, low and grabbable. If it had a zipper, you could store stuff in there, like a fanny pack. — Anne Lamott

Some people have a thick skin and you don't. Your heart is really open and that is going to cause pain, but that is an appropriate response to this world. — Anne Lamott

No one can appropriate God, goodness, the Bible or Jesus. It just seems that way. — Anne Lamott

I was the angriest daughter on earth, and also, one of the most devoted. — Anne Lamott

After a few days at the desk, telling the truth in an interesting way turns out to be as easy and pleasurable as bathing a cat. — Anne Lamott

Jesus had an affinity for prisoners. He had been one, after all. He must have often felt anxiety and isolation in jail, but He identified with the prisoners. He made a point of befriending the worst and most hated, because His message was that no one was beyond reach of divine love, despite society's way of stating the opposite. God, what a nut.
Finally we stood outside an inner gate, showed our IDs to the guards, and got our hands stamped with fluorescent ink. "You don't glow, you don't go," said one cheerful, pockmarked guard, which was the best spiritual advice I'd had in a long time. — Anne Lamott

Life is like a nice fresh batch of Swiss cheese. Note to self: savor the holes, too, like the spaces between musical notes. — Anne Lamott

You begin to cry and writhe and yell and then to keep on crying; and finally, grief ends up giving you the two best gifts: softness and illumination. Every — Anne Lamott

Toddlers can make you feel as if you have violated some archaic law in their personal Koran and you should die, infidel. — Anne Lamott

Life is not a submarine. — Anne Lamott

She wants to have hiked; I want to have had dessert. — Anne Lamott

It is hard to remember that you are a cherished spiritual being when you're burping up apple fritters and Cheetos. — Anne Lamott

To love yourself as you are is a miracle, and to seek yourself is to have found yourself for now. And now is all we have, and love is who we are. — Anne Lamott

Left to my own devices, would I trade this for firm thighs, fewer wrinkles, a better memory? On some days. That's why it's such a blessing I'm not left to my own devices. Because the truth is I have amazing friends and a deep faith in God, to whom I can turn. I have a cool kid, a sweet boyfriend, darling pets. I've learned to pay attention to life, and to listen. I'd give up all this for a flatter belly? Are you crazy? — 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

Sometimes it takes failure to figure out who you aren't. — Anne Lamott

I am the woman I grew to be partly in spite of my mother, and partly because of the extraordinary love of her best friends, and my own best friends' mothers, and from surrogates, many of whom were not women at all but gay men. I have loved them my entire life, even after their passing. — Anne Lamott

I quit my last real job, as a writer at a magazine, when I was twenty-one. That was the moment when I lost my place of prestige on the fast track, and slowly, millimeter by millimeter, I started to get found, to discover who I had been born to be, instead of the impossibly small package, all tied up tightly in myself, that I had agreed to be. That — Anne Lamott

We aren't a drop in the ocean, but are the ocean, in drops. — Anne Lamott

And autumn ain't so shabby for wow, either. The colors are broccoli and flame and fox fur. The tang is apples, death, and wood smoke. The rot smells faintly of grapes, of fermentation, of one element being changed alchemically into another, and the air is moist and you sleep under two down comforters in a cold room. The trails are not dusty anymore, and you get to wear your favorite sweaters. — Anne Lamott

The way I dance is by writing. — Anne Lamott

When you love something like reading - or drawing or music or nature - it surrounds you with a sense of connection to something great. — Anne Lamott

Nothing can be delicious when you are holding your breath. — Anne Lamott

Love falls to earth, rises from the ground, pools around the afflicted. Love pulls people back to their feet. Bodies and souls are fed. Bones and lives heal. New blades of grass grow from charred soil. The sun rises. — Anne Lamott

You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better. — Anne Lamott

My father treated them with respect and kindness, his main philosophical and spiritual position being: Don't be an asshole. — Anne Lamott

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

Because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be? — 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

If you have a body, you are entitled to the full range of feelings. It comes with the package. — Anne Lamott

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. — Anne Lamott

Where do we even start on the daily walk of restoration and awakening? We start where we are. — Anne Lamott

I worry that Jesus drinks himself to sleep when he hears me talk like this. — Anne Lamott

What I've learned to do when I sit down to work on a shitty first draft is to quiet the voices in my head. First there's the vinegar-lipped Reader Lady, who says primly, "Well, that's not very interesting, is it?" And there's the emaciated German male who writes these Orwellian memos detailing your thought crimes. And there are your parents, agonizing over your lack of loyalty and discretion; and there's William Burroughs, dozing off or shooting up because he finds you as bold and articulate as a houseplant; and so on. And there are also the dogs: let's not forget the dogs, the dogs in their pen who will surely hurtle and snarl their way out if you ever stop writing, because writing is, for some of us, the latch that keeps the door of the pen closed, keeps those crazy ravenous dogs contained. — Anne Lamott

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

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

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

It's so awful, attacking your child. It's the worse thing I know, to shout loudly at this 50 lb. being with his huge trusting brown eyes. It's like bitch-slapping E.T. — Anne Lamott

I read the same amount of nonfiction and fiction. — Anne Lamott

Joy is the best makeup. But a little lipstick is a close runner-up. — Anne Lamott

The solution is always spiritual, and it almost never has anything to do with the problem ... laughter is carbonated holiness. — Anne Lamott

Love is so much bigger than our ignorance. — Anne Lamott

People who read Anne Lamott, like people who read Anne Rice, believe that tragedy is romantic, but the people who read Anne Lamott believe it ironically. — Kevin Brockmeier

Nell's husband has short-man syndrome. Eddie is one of those deadly dull people who is so upbeat that I suspect he would subconsciously like to go through the neighborhood, house by house, with a machine gun. He seems oblivious to the effect that his long, rambling monologues have on people - he doesn't notice the blank faces, the fingers flexing like those of people buried alive, the ocular tics. You could write down his words verbatim, show them to him, and he'd probably say, 'I know someone just like that!' Then he'd tell you about that person until your teeth hurt. His hostage-taking is passive-aggressive. — Anne Lamott

When you don't have enough or you run out, you feel in your core that the leak has begun and there will be no end to the leakage. And this makes you feel like a chump. Whereas having some money gives you the conviction that you're not naked in the howling wind, even though you basically are, existentially. — Anne Lamott

But my subconscious mind
the part I've heard writers call the lizard brain
could and did: it told me to reach for Anne Lamott or Edith Wharton or Calvin Trillin instead. And if I've learned one thing in my decades on earth, it's this: Don't argue with your lizard brain; it knows you better than you know yourself. — Sara Nelson

If you are hoping to find your self-worth and fulfillment in other peoples' opinion of your writing, you will never find it. — Anne Lamott

Believing in George Bush was so ludicrous that believing in God almost seems rational. — 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

I don't write about the intimate details of my cousins and aunts and uncles, and my mother and my father because it's not right to, for me. — Anne Lamott

One of the hardest lessons I had to learn was that I was going to need a lot of help, and for a long time. (Even this morning.) What saved me was that I found gentle, loyal and hilarious companions, which is at the heart of meaning: maybe we don't find a lot of answers to life's tougher questions, but if we find a few true friends, that's even better. — Anne Lamott

I am drawn to people that are not going to shy away from the very dark, scary stuff of the human condition and in a lot of cases people need alcohol or drugs to create poetry and poetic pose that can take you so far out there where you are still able to recognize yourself and then to bring you back home where you're not the same person you were when you left. — 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

But it was the singing that pulled me in and split me wide open. — Anne Lamott

Children should not have treacherous diseases or be afraid. This should be one rule we all agree on. — Anne Lamott

If the present is really all we have, then the present lasts forever. — Anne Lamott

[W]hen you're dreaming, you're not the one calling the shots. So it's a reprieve. — Anne Lamott

If you don't die of thirst, there are blessings in the desert. You can be pulled into limitlessness, which we all yearn for, or you can do the beauty of minutiae, the scrimshaw of tiny and precise. The sky is your ocean, and the crystal silence will uplift you like great gospel music, or Neil Young. — Anne Lamott

We were raised to believe in books, music, and nature. — Anne Lamott

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

Our shadow is on the outside. And we can see in the dark: we can see you, we see you turn away, but one day we finally understand that you turn away not from our faces but from your own fears. From those things inside you that you think mark you as someone unlovable to your family, and society, and even to God. — Anne Lamott

One thing I know for sure about raising children is that every single day a kid needs discipline ... But also every single day a kid needs a break. — Anne Lamott

We all wanted this because let's face it, it's so inspiring and such a relief when people find a way to bear the unbearable, when you can organize things in such a way that a tiny miracle appears to have taken place and that love has once again turn out to be bigger than fear and death and blindness. — Anne Lamott