Anne Lamott Quotes

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.

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

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

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.

I do not understand the mystery of grace – only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us.

Laughter is carbonated holiness.

Expectations are resentments waiting to happen.

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

Hope is the intersection of faith and reality.

Joy is the best makeup.

Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist’s true friend.

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.

Almost everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, scared and yet designed for joy.

Not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die.

Peace is joy at rest. Joy is peace on its feet.

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul.

I always like to write on the assumption that the reader is at least as intelligent as I am.

Some people feel like they don’t deserve love. They walk away quietly into empty spaces, trying to close the gaps of the past.

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

Hope is the song of the heart, the hymn of the oppressed, the plea for a better world.

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.

I am all the ages I have ever been.

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.

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 don’t know why life isn’t constructed to be seamless and safe, why we make such glaring mistakes, things fall so short of our expectations, and our hearts get broken and out kids do scary things and our parents get old and don’t always remember to put pants on before they go out for a stroll.

I think joy and sweetness and affection are a spiritual path. We’re here to know God, to love and serve God, and to be blown away by the beauty and miracle of nature.

We all make mistakes, but to avoid difficulty requires failures, and the only way to learn is by failing.

The minute you start to wonder if you deserve better, you do.

It’s good to do uncomfortable things. It’s weight training for life.

Wanting to be liked means being a supporting character in your own life, using who you already are.

Things do not have to be perfect to be wonderful.

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

Sometimes you need to sit lonely on the floor in a quiet room in order to hear your own voice and not let it drown in the noise of others.

When God is going to do something wonderful, He always starts with a hardship; when God is going to do something amazing, He starts with an impossibility.

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

Surrender is the intersection between acceptance and trust.

You can’t buy happiness, but you can buy books, and that’s kind of the same thing.

The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.

You can tell people the truth or you can tell them a story.

Emotional hygiene is as important as washing your hands. It’s not just for sad people, but for all people.

Life is a precious unearned gift, and all we really have is this present moment.

The freedom to be responsible and take action is the birthright of every human being.

We’re all just walking each other home.

Loving ourselves through the process of owning our story is the bravest thing we will ever do.

What if the hokey pokey really is what it’s all about?

Expectations are resentments waiting to happen.

We write to expose the unexposed. If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. Otherwise, you’ll just be rearranging furniture in rooms you’ve already been in.

I don’t always know what I’m doing, but I’m trying my best, and that’s more than most people can say.

When we rebel against the present moment, we’re rebelling against the entire universe.

Love is the only engine of survival.