ANNE LAMOTT QUOTES IV

American author (1954- )

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


My heart was broken and my head was just barely inhabitable.

ANNE LAMOTT

Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith


I always want to know why, and I almost never have a good answer.

ANNE LAMOTT

interview, Friends Journal, Jan. 30, 2013


Part of me loves and respects men so desperately, and part of me thinks they are so embarrassingly incompetent at life and in love. You have to teach them the very basics of emotional literacy. You have to teach them how to be there for you, and part of me feels tender toward them and gentle, and part of me is so afraid of them, afraid of any more violation.

ANNE LAMOTT

Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year

Tags: men


Shirley Jackson said that a confused reader is an antagonistic reader, and I live by that. It's okay to start anywhere, and to let yourself write a big sloppy overly-detailed first draft. You just jump in, knowing that the water will be cold at first, but no one is making you swim.

ANNE LAMOTT

"Q&A: Anne Lamott", San Diego Magazine, Jan. 27, 2014


Joy is the best makeup.

ANNE LAMOTT

Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith

Tags: makeup


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


We'll have the Jesusiest time ever!

ANNE LAMOTT

address at the Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College, 2000


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


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

Tags: money


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

Tags: teenagers


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

Tags: hope


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


Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor.

ANNE LAMOTT

Bird by Bird


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

Tags: Jesus


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


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

Tags: failure


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

Tags: teenagers


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


What people somehow forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here.

ANNE LAMOTT

Bird by Bird