Anne Lamott Quotes

Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.

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.

Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns.

Dogs are the closest we come to knowing the divine love of God on this side of eternity.

... the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day. [pp. 65-66]

Sometimes I think that Jesus watches my neurotic struggles, and shakes his head and grips his forehead and starts tossing back mojitos.

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.

Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.

I thought the secret of life was obvious: be here now, love as if your whole life depended on it, find your life's work, and try to get hold of a giant panda.

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.

You can get the monkey off your back, but the circus never leaves town

The road to enlightenment is long and difficult, and you should try not to forget snacks and magazines.

A good marriage is where both people feel like they're getting the better end of the deal.

Churches are good for prayer, but so are garages and cars and mountains and showers and dance floors.

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.

People help you or you help them and when we offer or receive help, we take in each other. And then we are saved.

Laughter is carbonated holiness.

In fact, not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die.

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.

We must not inflict life on children who will be resented; we must not inflict unwanted children on society.

Don't look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.

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.

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.

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.

Forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a better past.

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.

You can either practice being right or practice being kind.

When faced with a crisis, do three things: breathe, pray and be kind.

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.

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.

Hope begins in the dark.

Never compare your insides to everyone else's outsides.

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.

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.

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

We are not here to see through one another, but to see one another through.

I spent my whole life helping my mother carry around her psychic trunks like a bitter bellhop. So a great load was lifted when she died, and my life was much easier.

If we stay where we are, where we're stuck, where we're comfortable and safe, we die there... When nothing new can get in, that's death.

I can tell you that what you're looking for is already inside you.

How do you begin? The answer is simple: you decide to.

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.

What fills us is real, sweet, dopey, funny life.

Listen to your broccoli and it will tell you how to eat it.

I'm human, you're human, let me greet your humanness. Let's be people together for a while.

Sometimes this human stuff is slimy and pathetic...but better to feel it and talk about it and walk through it than to spend a lifetime being silently poisoned.

Gratitude, not understanding, is the secret to joy and equanimity.

And she is going to dance, dance hungry, dance full, dance each cold astonishing moment, now when she is young and again when she is old.

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.

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor; the enemy of the people. It will keep you insane your whole life.

Love is so much bigger than our ignorance.