Anne Lamott Quotes

Mothers are supposed to listen and, afterward, to respond with some wisdom and perspective, but these things were not my mother’s strong suit.

I’ve heard people say that God is the gift of desperation, and there’s a lot to be said for having really reached a bottom where you’ve run out of any more good ideas or plans for everybody else’s behavior; or how to save and fix and rescue; or just get out of a huge mess, possibly of your own creation.

Living on Earth has always been a dangerous way to spend your time.

I’m drawn to almost any piece of writing with the words ‘divine love’ and ‘impeachment’ in the first sentence. But I know the word ‘divine’ makes many progressive people run screaming for their cute little lives, and so one hesitates to use it.

I got a lot of things that society had promised would make me whole and fulfilled – all the things that the culture tells you from preschool on will quiet the throbbing anxiety inside you – stature, the respect of colleagues, maybe even a kind of low-grade fame.

I would seriously rather be in a long line at the DMV than eat with people I don’t know.

No one tells you that your life is effectively over when you have a child: that you’re never going to draw another complacent breath again… or that whatever level of hypochondria and rage you’d learned to repress and live with is going to seem like the good old days.

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

I am the woman I grew to be partly in spite of my mother, and partly because of the extraordinary love of her best friends, and my own best friends’ mothers, and from surrogates, many of whom were not women at all but gay men. I have loved them my entire life, even after their passing.

There is nothing as sweet as a comeback, when you are down and out, about to lose, and out of time.

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

My mother was a not-too-devoted atheist. She went to Episcopal church on Christmas Eve every year, and that was mostly it.

Life is really pretty tricky, and there’s a lot of loss, and the longer you stay alive, the more people you lose whom you actually couldn’t live without.

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