American author (1954- )
I always want to know why, and I almost never have a good answer.
ANNE LAMOTT
interview, Friends Journal, Jan. 30, 2013
The three things I cannot change are the past, the truth, and you.
ANNE LAMOTT
Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers
Talking to the parents of older kids was helpful for me, since parents of kids the same age as yours won't admit how horrible their children are.
ANNE LAMOTT
Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith
Joy is the best makeup.
ANNE LAMOTT
Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith
You keep working on your piece over and over, trying to get the sections and paragraphs and sentences and the whole just right, but there's a point at which you can tell you've begun hurting the work with your perfectionism. Then you have to release the work to new eyes.
ANNE LAMOTT
"Q&A: Anne Lamott", San Diego Magazine, Jan. 27, 2014
You fall so deeply in love with your grandbaby. It's so so so much easier than being a parent, because you really don't have much responsibility. And just when you are at the end of your rope with exhaustion, the parents take the baby away. So it's the best of both worlds.
ANNE LAMOTT
"Q&A: Anne Lamott", San Diego Magazine, Jan. 27, 2014
When God is going to do something wonderful, He or She always starts with a hardship; when God is going to do something amazing, He or She starts with an impossibility.
ANNE LAMOTT
Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith
Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor.
ANNE LAMOTT
Bird by Bird
I felt alternately rubbery and empty, like sometimes I was landing on the Swiss cheese, sometimes on the holes.
ANNE LAMOTT
Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith
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.
ANNE LAMOTT
Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith
In biblical times, they used to stone a few thirteen-year-olds with some regularity, which helped keep the others quiet and at home. The mothers were usually in the first row of stone-throwers, and had to be restrained.
ANNE LAMOTT
Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith
I became a Christian before I got sober. So I was a drunk, bulimic Christian.
ANNE LAMOTT
interview, Big Think, Apr. 6, 2010
If you have a problem you can solve by throwing money at it, you don't have a very interesting problem.
ANNE LAMOTT
Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith
You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the rational mind.
ANNE LAMOTT
Bird by Bird
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.
ANNE LAMOTT
Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith
Slowly, after dozens of rejection slips and failures and false starts and postponed dreams--what Langston Hughes called dreams deferred--I stepped onto the hallowed ground of being a published novelist, and then, fifteen years later, I started to make real money.
ANNE LAMOTT
Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith
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.
ANNE LAMOTT
Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith
I tell you, it's a brand-new world, it's as radical as having an infant. And I'm as clueless. And it turns out there are no operating instructions and no owner's manual that come with a teenager either.
ANNE LAMOTT
interview, beliefnet
When people have seen you at their worst, you don't have to put on the mask as much.
ANNE LAMOTT
Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith
I'd wanted to be a writer my whole life. But when I finally made it, I felt like a greyhound catching the mechanical rabbit she'd been chasing for so long--discovering it was merely metal, wrapped in cloth. It wasn't alive; it had no spirit. It was fake.
ANNE LAMOTT
Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith