In the world of literature and profound wisdom, Quotes By Anne Lamott have etched an indelible mark. Known for her eloquent insights and thought-provoking words, Anne Lamott has consistently stirred hearts and ignited minds with her exceptional quotes. As we embark on this literary journey, we delve into the enchanting realm of Anne Lamott's wisdom, exploring the pearls of enlightenment she has generously bestowed upon the world.
In this article, we will unravel the profound meanings behind Quotes By Anne Lamott, delving into the wisdom they offer and the insights they provide into the human condition. So, join us on this enlightening voyage as we navigate the labyrinth of Anne Lamott's quotes and uncover the treasures of wisdom they hold.
Quotes By Anne Lamott (2024)
Anne Lamott's words have the power to touch our hearts and awaken our souls. Here are some unique and inspiring quotes by Anne Lamott that offer profound insights into life, love, and the human experience:
"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."
"Almost everything will work if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you."
"Expectations are resentments waiting to happen."
"Laughter is carbonated holiness."
"Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people."
"You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better."
"Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul."
"I am going to try to pay attention to the spring. I am going to look around at all the flowers, and look up at the hectic trees. I am going to close my eyes and listen."
"The two best prayers I know are 'Help me, help me, help me' and 'Thank you, thank you, thank you.'"
"Grace meets us where we are, but it doesn't leave us where it found us."
"You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do."
"Some people won't love you no matter what you do, and some people won't stop loving you no matter what you do. Go where the love is."
"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."
"Lighthouses don't go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining."
"The more I witness the suffering of others, the more I learn about the nature of reality, the more I come to my own realizations about the power of love and forgiveness."
"Gratitude, when it's real, when it's deeply felt, is its own form of prayer."
"Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns."
"You can either practice being right or practice being kind."
"Peace is joy at rest, and joy is peace on its feet."
"You don't always have to chop with the sword of truth. You can point with it too."
"There is nothing as sweet as a comeback, when you are down and out, about to lose, and out of time."
"Our calling is to love. That's the hardest thing to keep doing. It's so hard that we can't do it alone; we need help."
"I am all the ages I've ever been."
"Hope is the belief that God will do something for us. Faith is the belief that God will do something through us."
"You can't buy the love you want, you can't sell your love. It is available only for free."
"Joy is the best makeup."
"Almost everything will work if you unplug it for a few minutes… including you."
"Some of us tend to think that God wants us to be all shiny and perfect, but I think God wants us to be broken people who help broken people."
"My idea of absolute happiness is to be in bed on a rainy day, with my blankie, my cat, and my dog."
"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."
"Pay attention to the beauty surrounding you."
"Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor, because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong."
"Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor."
"I'm for any movement that separates the oppressive from the oppressed, that preaches love, respect, and that one group of people are not better than another."
"Everything works out in the end. If it hasn't worked out, it's not the end."
"Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts."
"All you can do is show up, do your best, and let go of the rest."
"Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird."
"Suffering is what happens when we resist the moment."
"Everything works out in the end. If it hasn't worked out, it's not the end."
"If you don't die of thirst, there are blessings in the desert. You can be pulled into limitlessness, which we all yearn for, or you can do the beauty of minutiae, the scrimshaw of tiny and precise. The sky is your ocean, and the crystal silence will uplift you like great gospel music, or Neil Young."
"I do not at all understand the mystery of grace—only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us."
"Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist's true friend."
"Almost everything will work if you unplug it for a few minutes…including you."
"You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander."
"I thought faith would say, 'I'll take away the pain and discomfort,' but what it ended up saying was, 'I'll sit with you in it.'"
"The great writers keep writing about the cold, dark place within, the water under the frozen lake, the secluded, lonely place, the place where there's no escape and no possibility of rescue."
"To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind."
"My mind is a bad neighborhood I try not to go into alone."
"Life is a precious unfathomably beautiful gift, and it is impossible here, on the incarnational side of things."
"The soul is crammed into the body like a sword in its sheath."
"There is almost nothing outside of you that will help in any kind of lasting way, unless you're waiting for an organ. You can't buy, achieve or date it. This is the most horrible truth."
"Becoming the person I was born to be is my life's work."
"Our true nature is to be kind of wild, probably, and to tell the truth."
"We're all in this together and we have to help one another and give love."
"Peace is joy at rest. Joy is peace on its feet."
"Don’t look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance."
"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 our 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."
"But grace can be the experience of a second wind, when even though what you want is clarity and resolution, what you get is stamina and poignancy and the strength to hang on."
"Laughter is really the only effective answer to death."
"And this, I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world."
"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."
"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."
"The reason I can write is that I have something to say. Writing is not an indulgence but a necessity."
"I think the real Jesus, the Jesus who existed before He was invented, the shining, revolutionary figure, was not about dead rituals and prohibitions and having a proper preoccupation with other people's sins."
"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."
"The road to enlightenment is long and difficult, and you should try not to forget snacks and magazines."
"All I ever wanted since I arrived here on earth were the same things I needed as a baby, to go from cold to warm, lonely to held, the vessel to the giver, empty to full."
"Telling the truth is the ball game. Try to love your neighbor, but don't take down the fence."
"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 our 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'm not an easygoing person. I'm incredibly messy. And I'm very emotional. I'm very passionate."
"Your experiences and education are blips compared to your relationship with God."
"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."
"Grace meets us where we are but doesn't leave us where it found us."
"I do not at all understand the mystery of grace – only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us."
"The reason I can still find my faith in Jesus is because He was and is a scandal to the world."
"It's good to do uncomfortable things. It's weight training for life."
"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."
"There's a lovely Hasidic story of a rabbi who always told his people that if they studied the Torah, it would put Scripture on their hearts. One of them asked, "Why on our hearts, and not in them?" The rabbi answered, "Only God can put Scripture inside. But reading sacred text can put it on your heart, and then when your hearts break, the holy words will fall inside."
"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. Like lily pads, round and green, these places summoned and then held me up while I grew. Each prepared me for the next leaf on which I would land, and in this way I moved across the swamp of doubt and fear."
"The deepest need we have is for connection. It's why we're here. It's what gives purpose and meaning to our lives."
"Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life."
"Forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a better past."
"Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be."
"It's okay to be a mess. It means you're out there doing something."
"I don't remember who said this, but there really are places in the heart you don't even know exist until you love a child."
"Laughter is the sound of the soul dancing."
"Listen to the people who love you. Believe that they are worth living for even when you don't believe it. Seek out the memories depression takes away and project them into the future. Be brave; be strong; take your pills. Exercise because it's good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds. Eat when food itself disgusts you. Reason with yourself when you have lost your reason."
"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."
"To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass—seeing things in such a narrow and darkly narcissistic way that it presents a colo-rectal theology, offering hope to no one."
"Hope is a strange invention —a privilege half way between life and death, lying down."
"In the dark, when you cannot see ahead of you, you go back to the beginning and start over."
"Life is like a recycling center, where all the concerns and dramas of humankind get recycled back and forth across the universe. But what you have to offer is your own sensibility, maybe your own sense of humor or insider pathos or meaning. All of us can sing the same song, and there will still be four billion different renditions."
"Telling the truth about our lives is not an easy task."
"Your experiences will be yours alone. But truth and best friendship will rarely if ever disappoint you."
"Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you."
"The mystery of grace is that God loves Henry Kissinger and Vladimir Putin and me exactly as much as He or She loves your new grandchild."
"You will lose someone you can't live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn't seal back up. And you come through. It's like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp."
"Write what you would want to read and feel blessed."
"We are here to make a tiny difference for someone (and, by the way, the 'someone' could be you)."
"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. You just have to get rid of so much baggage to be light enough to dance, to sing, to play."
"I do not understand the mystery of grace – only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us."
"Listen to people’s stories. You can’t be in this world and not know what other people are up against."
"The reason we're here is to see if we're here, to make our way from the dark to the light; get out of the brain and into the heart; and to see, and hear, the love and beauty, and the reasons for hope, that are there all the time."
"The worst stuff in the world will work itself out if you just keep moving."
"I think laughter is the only thing that will save us, and stories of course. If you understand what your readers and viewers want, you can stay a step ahead of them."
"The more I write, the more I am able to access those parts of me that are deeper, truer, more authentic."
"Expectations are resentments under construction."
"The reason we're here is to see if we're here, and to see if we can say yes."
"Listen to people's stories. You can't be in this world and not know what other people are up against."
"I'm all for progress, but I believe we should grow the way trees grow, from the inside out."
"I am a person who has an unwavering respect for the human capacity to absorb the truth, no matter how long it takes, no matter how many stories must be absorbed and then accepted for progress to be made."
"The main thing is to pay attention. Pay close attention to everything, especially to what you have dismissed or felt uncomfortable about."
"The reason I can still find my faith in Jesus is because He was and is a scandal to the world."
In the world of literature and wisdom, Anne Lamott's words have shone brightly as guiding lights for those seeking understanding, solace, and humor in the intricate dance of life. Her extensive collection of quotes has offered a tapestry of insights, often wrapped in wit and honesty, that resonate with people from all walks of life. From the importance of forgiveness and kindness to the acknowledgment of our imperfections, Lamott's wisdom serves as a constant reminder of our shared humanity. "Quotes By Anne Lamott" encapsulates the essence of her work, reminding us to find grace in the ordinary, to embrace our quirks, and to journey through life with open hearts and open minds.
