Anne Lamott Quotes

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.

I'm kind of a gossip hound, but watching the media whip the small fires into giant forest fires so that they can cover the result is infuriating.

You can change the world with a hot bath, if you sink into it from a place of knowing that you are worth profound care, even when you're dirty and rattled.

If you fixate on the big picture, the whole shebang, the overview, you miss the stitching.

I have a giant ego and terrible self-esteem, so I need to hit the re-set button fairly regularly - to get into presence, and humility, and being right-sized.

Frederick Buechner is one of my favorite writers. The Eyes of the Heart is beautiful and wise, full of insight, charm, and tenderness.

The beauty of modesty ... a virtue the world doesn't have much truck with: one ordinary flower in a vase, as opposed to a bouquet.

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

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

When we did art with the kids, the demons would lie down.

Mattie sat at the table, obsessing, orbiting around herself. She was sick of her worried, hostile mind. It would have killed her long before, she felt, if it hadn't needed the transportation.

The clipping said forgiveness meant that God is for giving, and that we are here for giving too, and that to withold love or blessings is to be completely delusional.

It is a violation of trust to use your kids as caulking for the cracks in you.

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

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

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

I accidentally forgot to graduate from college.

Mothers are supposed to listen and, afterward, to respond with some wisdom and perspective, but these things were not my mother's strong suit.

All freedom comes from discipline.

Living on Earth has always been a dangerous way to spend your time.

If you're lucky you find your way into a spiritual community and you start to find the great teachers of all the ages who said the same thing. There's only love, you're made of love.

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.

Charles had once remarked that holding onto a resentment was like eating rat poison and waiting for the rat to die.

A hundred years from now? All new people.

It's better to be kind than to be right.

Having a baby is like suddenly getting the world's worst roommate.

Gratitude begins in our hearts and then dovetails into behavior. It almost always makes you willing to be of service, which is where the joy resides.

Laughter is the key that grace has arrived.

When you pray, you are not starting the conversation from scratch, just remembering to plug back into a conversation that's always in progress.

Tidiness makes me think of held breath, of suspended animation.

There is ecstasy in paying attention. You can get into a kind of Wordsworthian openness to the world, where you see in everything the essence of holiness.

You can tell if people are following Jesus, because they are fedding the poor, sharing their wealth, and trying to get everyone medical insurance.

You just have to keep getting out of your own way so that whatever it is that wants to be written can use you to write it.

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.

by then I'd figured out the gift of failure, which is that it breaks through all that held breath and isometric tension about needing to look good: it's the gift of feeling floppier.

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

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

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

Anne Lamott’s priest friend Tom, how to get through: "Left foot, right foot, left foot, breathe," he said. "Right foot, left foot, right foot, breathe." Salon April 25, 2003

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

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.

The real payoff is the writing itself, that a day when you have gotten your work done is a good day, that total dedication is the point.

I am all the ages I've ever been.

If you want to make God laugh, tell her your plans.

Anything you say from your heart to God is a prayer.

The truth is that progress is usually small and sneaky.

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.

I read the same amount of nonfiction and fiction.

My natural tendency is to complicate everything--and then to spray words and ideas onto everything afterwards. I've had to develop the habit of keeping things simple.

My deepest belief is that to live as if we're dying can set us free. Dying people teach you to pay attention and to forgive and not to sweat the small things.