Anne Lamott is an American novelist and nonfiction author. She is also a public speaker, writing instructor, and progressive political activist. Lamott is based in Marin County, California. Her autobiography dominates her nonfiction writing. Alcoholism, single motherhood, depression, and Christianity are just a few of the topics covered in Lamott’s writings, which are distinguished by their self-deprecating humor and openness.
83 Anne Lamott Quotes
- “No” is a complete sentence.”
2. “Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.”
3. “Never compare your insides to everyone else’s outsides.”
4. “If you want to change the way you feel about people, you have to change the way you treat them.”
5. “Joy is the best makeup.”
6. “Laughter is carbonated holiness.”
7. “Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.”
8. “Peace is joy at rest. Joy is peace on its feet.”
9. “You can either practice being right or practice being kind.”
10. “I don’t think you have time to waste not writing because you are afraid you won’t be good at it.”
11. “A good marriage is where both people feel like they’re getting the better end of the deal.”
12. “Jealousy always has been my cross, the weakness and woundedness in me that has most often caused me to feel ugly and unlovable.”
13. “You can get the monkey off your back, but the circus never leaves town”
Anne Lamott Quotes On Forgiveness
14. “Not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die.”
15. “Forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a better past.”
16. “Forgiveness means it finally becomes unimportant that you hit back.”
17. “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.”
18. “Jealousy has always been my cross, the weakness and woundedness in me that has most often caused me to feel ugly and unlovable, like the Bad Seed.”
19. “It’s good to do uncomfortable things. It’s weight training for life.”
Anne Lamott Quotes On Perfectionism
20. “Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life.”
21. “Expectations are resentments waiting to happen.”
22. “Perfection is shallow, unreal, and fatally uninteresting.”
23. “Perfectionism means that you try not to leave so much mess to clean up. But clutter and mess show us that life is being lived.”
24. “Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life .”
25. “Expectations are resentments under construction.”
26. “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.”
Anne Lamott Quotes on Writing
27. “Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul.”
28. “My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I’m grateful for it the way I’m grateful for the ocean.”
29. “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”
30. “It’s better to be kind than to be right.”
31. “Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.”
32. “A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way.”
33. “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.”
34. “This is one thing they forget to mention in most child-rearing books, that at times you will just lose your mind. Period. ”
35. “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.”
36. “The road to enlightenment is long and difficult, and you should try not to forget snacks and magazines.”
Inspiring Anne Lamott Quotes
36. “Gratitude, not understanding, is the secret to joy and equanimity.”
37. “If you have a body, you are entitled to the full range of feelings. It comes with the package.”
38. “Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.”
39. “Being enough was going to have to be an inside job.”
40. “If you want to make God laugh, tell her your plans.”
41. “I am all the ages I’ve ever been.”
42. “Sometimes grace is a ribbon of mountain air that gets in through the cracks.”
43. “There are really places in your heart that you don’t know exist until you love a child.”
44. “I kept my expectations low, which is one of the secrets of life.”
Famous Anne Lamott Quotes
45. “Hope is not about proving anything. It’s about choosing to believe this one thing, that love is bigger than any grim, bleak shit anyone can throw at us.”
46. “We all know we’re going to die; what’s important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this.”
47. “Sometimes grace works like water wings when you feel you are sinking.”
48. “I remember staring at my son endlessly when he was an infant, stunned by his very existence, wondering where on earth he had come from.”
49. “Prayer is taking a chance that against all odds and past history, we are loved and chosen, and do not have to get it together before we show up.”
50. “Maybe what we say to each other is not so important after all, but just that we are alive together, and present for each other as best we can be.”
51. “It is a violation of trust to use your kids as caulking for the cracks in you.”
52. “Your problem is how you are going to spend this one 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 circumstances, or whether you are going to taste it, enjoy it and find out the truth about who you are.”
Anne Lamott Quotes To Live By
53. “My mind is a neighborhood I try not to go into alone.”
54. “So a moral position is not a message. A moral position is a passionate caring inside you.”
55. “When you make friends with fear, it can’t rule you.”
56. “Growing up is not going nearly as efficiently as I had hoped.”
57. “Rest and laughter are the most spiritual and subversive acts of all. Laugh, rest, slow down.”
58. “The opposite of faith is not doubt, it’s certainty.”
59. “Grief ends up giving you the two best things: softness and illumination.”
60. “You don’t always have to chop with the sword of truth. You can point with it too.”
61. “My heart was broken and my head was just barely inhabitable”
62. “Don’t look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.”
Positive Anne Lamott Quotes
63. “For a life oriented to leisure is in the end a life oriented to death – the greatest leisure of all.”
64. “You should not bring more items and hurdles to the obstacle course.”
65. “And as it turns out, if one person is praying for you, buckle up. Things can happen.”
66. “If you’re not enough before the gold medal, you won’t be enough with it.”
65. “Getting found almost always means being lost for a while.”
66. “It is funny how no one seems to want my always excellent advice.”
67. “God can’t clean the house of you when you’re still in it.”
68. “Everything slows down when we listen and stop trying to fix the unfixable.”
69. “It was not facing what life dealt that made you crazy, but rather trying to set life straight where it was unstraightenable.”
70. “I never had a particularly strong craving to procreate, except for earlier fantasies of wanting to be Marmee in Little Women.”
Mind-Provoking Anne Lamott Quotes
71. “You have to be grateful whenever you get to someplace safe and okay, even if it turns out it wasn’t quite where you were heading.”
72. “Everybody thinks their opinion is the right one. If they didn’t, they would get a new one.”
73. “One secret of life is that the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day. Another secret is that laughter is carbonated holiness”
74. “Having a baby is like suddenly getting the world’s worst roommate.”
75. “We were raised to believe in books, music, and nature.”
76. “Teenagers who do not go to church are adored by God, but they don’t get to meet some of the people who love God back.”
77. “If your wife locks you out of the house, you don’t have a problem with your door.”
78. “Courage is fear that has said its prayers.”
79. “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.”
80. “The truth is that your spirits don’t rise until you get way down.”
81. “He got me a cup of tea with honey, toast with honey, yogurt with honey, like I was John the Baptist with the flu.”
82. “Astonishing material and revelation appear in our lives all the time. Let it be. Unto us, so much is given. We just have to be open for business.”
83. “Rituals are a good signal to your unconscious that it is time to kick in.”
A Must Read: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott
Additional Read: Anne Lamott Bestselling Novelist & Essayist