Anne Lamott is a famous American novelist and she is known for her iconic works such as Bird by Bird with Anie. She is also an activist, writing teacher and more. So here we have picked up some of the best quotes by her.
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Anne Lamott Quotes Almost Everything
“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.”
“My parents and librarians along the way taught me about the space between words; about the margins, where so many juicy moments of life and spirit and friendship could be found. In a library, you could find miracles and truth and you might find something that would make you laugh so hard that you get shushed, in the friendliest way.”
“I am skittish about relationships, as most of the marriages I’ve seen up close have been ruinous for one or both parties.”
“Every woman’s path is difficult, and many mothers were as equipped to raise children as wire monkey mothers. I say that without judgment: It is, sadly, true. An unhealthy mother’s love is withering.”
“I see that children fill the existential hollowness many people feel; that when we have children, we know they will need us, and maybe love us, but we don’t have a clue how hard it is going to be.”
“Life is really pretty tricky, and there’s a lot of loss, and the longer you stay alive, the more people you lose whom you actually couldn’t live without.”
“Your experiences will be yours alone. But truth and best friendship will rarely if ever disappoint you.”
“When we’re dealing with the people in our family – no matter how annoying or gross they may be, no matter how self-inflicted their suffering may appear, no matter how afflicted they are with ignorance, prejudice or nose hairs – we give from the deepest parts of ourselves.”
“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.”
“Pay attention to the beauty surrounding you.”
“I am going to try to pay attention to the spring. I am going to look around at all the flowers, and look up at the hectic trees. I am going to close my eyes and listen.”
“Bananas are great, as I believe them to be the only known cure for existential dread. Also, Mother Teresa said that in India, a woman dying in the street will share her banana with anyone who needs it, whereas, in America, people amass and hoard as many bananas as they can to sell for an exorbitant profit. So half of them go bad, anyway.”
“The American way is to not need help, but to help.”
“I just try to love and serve everyone, and bring everyone water, and lend an ear; that’s what Jesus said to do.”
“We must not inflict life on children who will be resented; we must not inflict unwanted children on society.”
“I was raised by my parents to believe that you had a moral obligation to try and help save the world.”
“Age has given me the gift of me; it just gave me what I was always longing for, which was to get to be the woman I’ve already dreamt of being. Which is somebody who can do rest and do hard work and be a really constant companion, a constant, tender-hearted wife to myself.”
“I try to write the books I would love to come upon that are honest, concerned with real lives, human hearts, spiritual transformation, families, secrets, wonder, craziness – and that can make me laugh.”
“I’ve known for years that resentments don’t hurt the person we resent, but they do hurt us.”
“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.”
“I was raised in a family where none of us ever raised a voice, so there was no room to express feelings of rage or even unabashed joy – a little bashed joy, here or there, or being mildly disgruntled.”
“It’s a great time to be alive.”
My idea of absolute happiness is to be in bed on a rainy day, with my blankie, my cat, and my dog.
“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.”
“We’re often ashamed of asking for so much help because it seems selfish or petty or narcissistic, but I think, if there’s a God – and I believe there is – that God is there to help. That’s what God’s job is.”
“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.”
“I’ve heard that our greatest cross to carry is ourselves – how gravely we fall short.”
“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.”
“I go to church every Sunday, which is like going to the gas station once a week and really, really filling up.”
“I was raised with no religious training or influence. Except the influence was to be a moral and ethical person at the secular level. And to be a peace marcher, an activist for civil rights, peace, and justice.”
“For me, Jesus is my cleft in the rock. He is my safest friend, my safe totally loving accepting big brother.”
“No one can appropriate God, goodness, the Bible or Jesus. It just seems that way.”
“I am not writing to try and convert people to fundamental Christianity. I am just trying to share my experience, strength, and hope, that someone who is as messed up and neurotic and scarred and scared can be fully accepted by our dear Lord, no questions asked.”
“If our lives are made up of a string of a thousand moments, at some of those moments we look a lot more spiritually evolved than at others.”
“I think Jesus is divine love manifest on Earth, as it comes through the community of Christians.”
“You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”
“I loved every second of the Catholic church. I loved the sickly sweet rotting-pomegranate smells of the incense. I loved the overwrought altar, the birdbath of holy water, the votive candles; I loved that there was a poor box, the stations of the cross rendered in stained glass on the windows.”
“A whole lot of us believers, of all different religions, are ready to turn back the tide of madness by walking together, in both the dark and the light – in other words, through life – registering voters as we go, and keeping the faith.”
“I’ve heard people say that God is the gift of desperation, and there’s a lot to be said for having really reached a bottom where you’ve run out of any more good ideas or plans for everybody else’s behavior; or how to save and fix and rescue; or just get out of a huge mess, possibly of your own creation.”
“I write because writing is the gift God has given me to help people in the world.”
“My coming to faith did not start with a leap but rather a series of staggers from what seemed like one safe place to another. Like lily pads, round and green, these places summoned and then held me up while I grew. Each prepared me for the next leaf on which I would land, and in this way, I moved across the swamp of doubt and fear.”
Anne Lamott Quotes On Hope
“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.”
“The reason I never give up hope is because everything is so basically hopeless.”
“When hope is not pinned wriggling onto a shiny image or expectation, it sometimes floats forth and opens.”
“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.”
“Your problem is how you are going to spend this one odd and precious life you have been issued. Whether you’re going to spend it trying to look good and creating the illusion that you have power over people and circumstances, or whether you are going to taste it, enjoy it and find out the truth about who you are.”
Anne Lamott Quotes
“The Giants are usually described as ragtag, kind of a great garage sale team and the Democrats are described as the Mommies to the Republican Daddies; and everyone hates the mommies, but wait, wait – I didn’t intend to get into the pathos and thrill of being a Democratic Giants fan.”
“The worst part about celebrating another birthday is the shock that you’re only as well as you are.”
“I used to tell my writing students that they must write the books they wished they could come upon – because then the books they hungered and thirsted for would exist.”
“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.”
“The whistle is always waiting to be blown, and in some ways, it gets me to do better work.”
“Seeing yourself in print is such an amazing concept: you can get so much attention without having to actually show up somewhere… You don’t have to dress up, for instance, and you can’t hear them boo you right away.”
“Presents can make up for some of the disappointments that life doles out, such as it makes almost no sense and is coming to an end more quickly than ever.”
“My mother might find a thin gold chain at the back of a drawer, wadded into an impossibly tight knot, and give it to me to untangle. It would have a shiny, sweaty smell, and excite me: Gold chains linked you to the great fairy tales and myths, to Arabia, and India; to the great weight of the world, but lighter than a feather.”
“Alice Adams wrote a sweet note to me after my first novel came out when I was 26, and I was so blown away that I sent her a bunch of stamps by return mail. I have no idea what I was thinking. It was a star-struck impulse.”
“I feel incredibly successful. I make a living as a writer and am able to help support a big family, my church, my bleeding-heart causes.”
“The earth is rocky and full of roots; it’s clay, and it seems doomed and polluted, but you dig little holes for the ugly shriveled bulbs, throw in a handful of poppy seeds, and cover it all over, and you know you’ll never see it again – it’s death and clay and shrivel, and your hands are nicked from the rocks, your nails black with soil.”
“I like to read away as much of the afternoon as possible until real life rears its ugly head.”
“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.”
“No one is more sentimentalized in America than mothers on Mother’s Day, but no one is more often blamed for the culture’s bad people and behavior.”
“When I was a kid, our family used to watch ‘Bonanza.’ I really liked having a Sunday night TV ritual.”
“Summer nearly does me in every year. It’s too hot and the light is unforgiving and the days go on way too long.”
“I am an Aries. Although I do not believe in astrology, I think this is exactly the right sign to have been born under.”
“I don’t have very sophisticated taste in music. I listen to a lot of folk music. I like reggae.”
“I have a very dark sense of humor. I swear. I have a very playful relationship with Jesus.”
“I like the desert for short periods of time, from inside a car, with the windows rolled up, and the doors locked. I prefer beach resorts with room service.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I accidentally forgot to graduate from college.”
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