Here’s a selection of Anne Lamott Quotes, covering topics such as grace, grief, writing and small victories.
We really hope you enjoy these quotes and that they give you something to think about.
Not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die.
You can get the monkey off your back, but the circus never leaves town.
I didn’t need to understand the hypostatic unity of the Trinity; I just needed to turn my life over to whoever came up with redwood trees.
I can tell you that what you’re looking for is already inside you.
You can safely assume you’ve created god in your own image when it turns out that god hates all the same people you do.
Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.
No” is a complete sentence.
You can either practice being right or practice being kind.
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.
I do not know much about God and prayer, but I have come to believe over the last twenty-five years, that there’s something to be said about keeping prayer simple. Help, Thanks, Wow.
Sometimes I think that Jesus watches my neurotic struggles, and shakes his head and grips his forehead and starts tossing back mojitos.
Pay attention to the beauty surrounding you.
The whistle is always waiting to be blown, and in some ways, it gets me to do better work.
Your experiences will be yours alone. But truth and best friendship will rarely if ever disappoint you.
I thought such awful thoughts that I cannot even say them out loud because they would make jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish.
A good marriage is where both people feel like they’re getting the better end of the deal.
I do not understand the mystery of grace — only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us.
People help you or you help them and when we offer or receive help, we take in each other. And then we are saved.
Forgiveness means it finally becomes unimportant that you hit back. You’re done. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you want to have lunch with the person. If you keep hitting back, you stay trapped in the nightmare…
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.
I’m drawn to almost any piece of writing with the words ‘divine love’ and ‘impeachment’ in the first sentence. But I know the word ‘divine’ makes many progressive people run screaming for their cute little lives, and so one hesitates to use it.
My heart was broken and my head was just barely inhabitable.
Laughter is carbonated holiness.
When god is going to do something wonderful, he or she always starts with a hardship; when god is going to do something amazing, he or she starts with an impossibility.
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.
Dogs are the closest we come to knowing the divine love of God on this side of eternity.
Courage is fear that has said its prayers.
Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.
It’s good to do uncomfortable things. It’s weight training for life.
Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don’t give up.
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.
Expectations are resentments under construction.
Grief, as I read somewhere once, is a lazy susan. One day it is heavy and underwater, and the next day it spins and stops at loud and rageful, and the next day at wounded keening, and the next day numbness, silence.
Rule 1: When all else fails, follow instructions. And Rule 2: Don’t be an asshole.
And as it turns out, if one person is praying for you, buckle up. Things can happen.
Your inside person doesn’t age. Your inside person is soul, is heart, in the eternal now, the ageless, the old, the young, all the ages you’ve ever been.
I’m human, you’re human, let me greet your humanness. Let’s be people together for a while.
There is nothing as sweet as a comeback, when you are down and out, about to lose, and out of time.
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.
I know that sometimes these friends feel that they have been expelled from the ordinary world they lived in before and that they are now citizens of the land of the f*cked.
I think that is why we stay close to our families, no matter how neurotic the members, how deeply annoying or dull- because when people have seen you at your worst, you don’t have to put on the mask as much.
I smiled back at her. I thought such awful thoughts that I cannot even say them out loud because they would make jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish.
Who was it who said that forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a different past?.
There is nothing more touching to me then a family picture where everyone is trying to look his or her best, but you can see what a mess they all really are.
Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul.
Some people won’t go the extra mile, and then on their birthday, when no one makes a fuss, they feel neglected and bitter.
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 b*tch-slapping e.t.
This is one thing they forget to mention in most child-rearing books, that at times you will just lose your mind. Period.
Without using the word, everyone started forgiving each other again. Just like that, from the no of all nothingness: you have a big tense mess and out of it comes some joy. It must be magic.
Small is how blessings, healing, progress and increase occur.
The road to enlightenment is long and difficult, and you should try not to forget snacks and magazines.
It’s a great time to be alive.
Then the singing enveloped me. It was furry and resonant, coming from everyone’s very heart. There was no sense of performance or judgment, only that the music was breath and food.
You have to make mistakes to find out who you aren’t. You take the action, and the insight follows: You don’t think your way into becoming yourself.
Churches are good for prayer, but so are garages and cars and mountains and showers and dance floors.
We are not here to see through one another, but to see one another through.
…because when people have seen you at their worst, you don’t have to put on the mask as much.
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.
I am an Aries. Although I do not believe in astrology, I think this is exactly the right sign to have been born under.
But grace can be the experience of a second wind, when even though what you want is clarity and resolution, what you get is stamina and poignancy and the strength to hang on.
The reason I never give up hope is because everything is so basically hopeless.
Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns.
We begin to find and become ourselves when we notice how we are already found, already truly, entirely, wildly, messily, marvelously who we were born to be.
Again and again I tell God I need help, and God says, ‘Well, isn’t that fabulous? Because I need help too. So you go get that old woman over there some water, and I’ll figure out what we’re going to do about your stuff.
When you make friends with fear, it can’t rule you.
I was reminded of the Four Immutable Laws of the Spirit: Whoever is present are the right people. Whenever it begins is the right time. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened. And when it’s over, it’s over.
Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of god is glue.
…most of the time, all you have is the moment, and the imperfect love of the people around you.
Hope is not about proving anything. It’s about choosing to believe this one thing, that love is bigger than any grim, bleak sh*t anyone can throw at us.
I do not at all understand the mystery of grace – only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.
Forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a better past.
When faced with a crisis, do three things: breathe, pray and be kind.
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.
[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.
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.
Hope begins in the dark.
The miracle is that we are here, that no matter how undone we’ve been the night before, we wake up every morning and are still here. It is phenomenal just to be.
For twenty years I have ached to go back home, when there was nobody there to whom I could return.
Most of me was glad when my mother died. She was a handful, but not in a cute, festive way. More in a life-threatening way, that had caused me a long time ago to give up all hope of ever feeling good about having had her as a mother.
The thing about light is that it really isn’t yours; it’s what you gather and shine back. And it gets more power from reflectiveness; if you sit still and take it in, it fills your cup, and then you can give it off yourself.
What’s the difference between you and God? God never thinks he’s you.
You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.
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.
… the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day. [pp. 65-66]
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. The cost is high, but the blessing of being compassionate is beyond your wildest dreams.
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