Anne Lamott Quotes

There are a lot of us, some published, some not, who think the literary life is the loveliest one possible, this life of reading and writing and corresponding. We think this life is nearly ideal.

Life with most teenagers was like having a low-grade bladder infection. It hurts, but you had to tough it out.

There is ecstasy in paying attention.

Write as if your parents are dead.

When everything starts going wrong all at once, it is to protect something big and lovely that is trying to get itself born.

At our most primitive we are storytellers and dancers.

Sam said to me the other day, "I love you like 20 tyrannosauruses on 20 mountaintops," and this is the exact same way in which I love him.

I’m probably just as good a mother as the next repressed, obsessive-compulsive paranoiac.

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.

My best teachers were mess, failure, death, mistakes, and the people I hated, including myself.

Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don't worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent.

Now, if you ask me, what’s going on is that we’re all up to here in it, and probably the most important thing is that we not yell at one another.

Learning to love back is the hardest part of being alive.

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

I honestly think that in order to be a writer you have to learn to be reverent. If not, why are you writing? Why are you here?

You have to be a warrior and say, "Maybe it's everyone else's system, but it's not mine." (from her recent interview here, on Goodreads)

You must not inflict life on someone who will be resented.

There is a door we all want to walk through and writing can help you find it and open it.

When I was a kid, our family used to watch 'Bonanza.' I really liked having a Sunday night TV ritual.

Some people seem to understand this - that life and change take time - but I am not one of those people.

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

I write because writing is the gift God has given me to help people in the world.

She lived in fear of ifonic endings.

You simply keep putting down one damn word after the other, as you hear them, as they come to you. You can either set brick as a laborer or as an artist.

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.

Summer nearly does me in every year. It's too hot and the light is unforgiving and the days go on way too long.

It's almost like learning to meditate to learn to hear what your kid is actually saying.

The evidence is in, and you are the verdict.

Grace arrived, like the big, loopy stitches with which a grandmotherly stranger might baste your hem temporarily.

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.

Everything takes me forever. It's all lurch, flail. I hope that is good news to you writers.

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.

I do not have deep theological understanding or opinion, but I do not read the Bible as the literal word of God.

I am skittish about relationships, as most of the marriages I've seen up close have been ruinous for one or both parties.

The whistle is always waiting to be blown, and in some ways, it gets me to do better work.

Sometimes Heaven is just a new pair of glasses.

Raising a child, whether or not it is yours, is like Nautilus of the heart and soul.

I believe that discipline and self-love are the total secrets to freedom.

I love silence. I seek and create it at every opportunity. I need it to work.

I spend most of my time alone, because I so value and thrive in the quiet. Heaven.

I am a terrible and lazy Christian. I do not believe that the Bible is the literal word of God. I just skip about a third of it.

I'm very successful, but there are 50,000 general interest books published every year. If you don't want to read mine, there are others.

I think drugs are part of the magical possibilities of youth and I wouldn't be here if I had continued with it.

My family tends to be pretty alcoholic and drug-addicted.

My experience as a writer is that you really do write seven and eight pages to find the paragraph you were after all along.

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

I have been somebody who has not written a great deal about the truth of my family's life.

I've always understood that meditation had to be part of - or was part of the natural path and so I've always sort of dabbled in it.

Reading poetry and reading the great works of the canon that we were reading in the '60s and the '70s and '80s was mind altering.

In fact, there's really only one thing that everything's made of; it's energy.