Anne Lamott quote: "Peg came over with dinner tonight and told me about this dumb schmaltzy poem she heard someone read at an AA meeting. It got me thinking. It was about how while we are on earth, our limitations are such that we can only see the underside of the tapestry that God is weaving. God sees the topside, the whole evolving portrait and its amazing beauty, and uses us as the pieces of thread to weave the picture. We see the glorious colors and shadings, but we also see the knots and the threads hanging down, the think lumpy patches, the tangles. But God and the people in heaven with him see how beautiful the portraits in the tapestry are. The poem says in this flowery way that faith is about the willingness to be used by God wherever and however he most needs you, most needs the piece of thread that is your life. You give him your life to put through his needle, to use as he sees fit."

Bananas are great, as I believe them to be the only known cure for existential dread. Also, Mother T...
ANNE LAMOTT

I do not at all understand the mystery of grace - only that it meets us where we are but does not le...
ANNE LAMOTT

I am going to try to pay attention to the spring. I am going to look around at all the flowers, and ...
ANNE LAMOTT

I am going to notice the lights of the earth, the sun and the moon and the stars, the lights of our ...
ANNE LAMOTT

For me, Jesus is my cleft in the rock. He is my safest friend, my safe totally loving accepting big ...
ANNE LAMOTT

The whistle is always waiting to be blown, and in some ways, it gets me to do better work.
ANNE LAMOTT

Being on a book tour is like being on the seesaw when you're a little kid. The excitement is in ...
ANNE LAMOTT

No one is more sentimentalized in America than mothers on Mother's Day, but no one is more often...
ANNE LAMOTT

You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the ...
ANNE LAMOTT

I don't remember who said this, but there really are places in the heart you don't even know exist u...
ANNE LAMOTT

Then the singing enveloped me. It was furry and resonant, coming from everyone's very heart. There w...
ANNE LAMOTT

Teenagers who do not go to church are adored by God, but they don't get to meet some of the people w...
ANNE LAMOTT

The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith in...
ANNE LAMOTT

It turned out this man worked for the Dalai Lama. And she said gently-that they believe when a lot o...
ANNE LAMOTT

When hope is not pinned wriggling onto a shiny image or expectation, it sometimes floats forth and o...
ANNE LAMOTT

A hundred years from now? All new people.
ANNE LAMOTT

Seeing yourself in print is such an amazing concept: you can get so much attention without having to...
ANNE LAMOTT

Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, t...
ANNE LAMOTT

I've written six novels and four pieces of nonfiction, so I don't really have a genre these days.
ANNE LAMOTT

You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all...
ANNE LAMOTT

[Lamott is an unstoppable storyteller, whether writing about church-going with a sullen adolescent o...
ANNE LAMOTT

We must not inflict life on children who will be resented; we must not inflict unwanted children on ...
ANNE LAMOTT

You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly abo...
ANNE LAMOTT

When we're dealing with the people in our family - no matter how annoying or gross they may be, ...
ANNE LAMOTT

Sometimes I think God loves the ones who most desperately ache and are most desperately lost - his o...
ANNE LAMOTT

I accidentally forgot to graduate from college.
ANNE LAMOTT

I loved every second of Catholic church. I loved the sickly sweet rotting-pomegranate smells of the ...
ANNE LAMOTT

If you don't die of thirst, there are blessings in the desert. You can be pulled into limitlessn...
ANNE LAMOTT

Some people won't go the extra mile, and then on their birthday, when no one makes a fuss, they ...
ANNE LAMOTT

My idea of absolute happiness is to be in bed on a rainy day, with my blankie, my cat, and my dog.
ANNE LAMOTT

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

Every woman's path is difficult, and many mothers were as equipped to raise children as wire mon...
ANNE LAMOTT

Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, t...
ANNE LAMOTT

Everyone is flailing through this life without an owner's manual, with whatever modicum of grace...
ANNE LAMOTT

We can't understand when we're pregnant, or when our siblings are expecting, how profound it...
ANNE LAMOTT

The earth is rocky and full of roots; it's clay, and it seems doomed and polluted, but you dig l...
ANNE LAMOTT

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor.
ANNE LAMOTT

My mother was a not-too-devoted atheist. She went to Episcopal church on Christmas Eve every year, a...
ANNE LAMOTT

Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report wri...
ANNE LAMOTT

The women's movement burst forth when I was fifteen. That was when I began to believe that life ...
ANNE LAMOTT

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

Remember that you own what happened to you. If your childhood was less than ideal, you may have been...
ANNE LAMOTT

No" is a complete sentence.
ANNE LAMOTT

I didn't need to understand the hypostatic unity of the Trinity; I just needed to turn my life over ...
ANNE LAMOTT

I am an Aries. Although I do not believe in astrology, I think this is exactly the right sign to hav...
ANNE LAMOTT

My mother might find a thin gold chain at the back of a drawer, wadded into an impossibly tight knot...
ANNE LAMOTT

I was raised in a family where none of us ever raised a voice, so there was no room to express feeli...
ANNE LAMOTT

It was simple reality - most competitive tennis players in my day were privileged, spoiled, entitled...
ANNE LAMOTT

The road to enlightenment is long and difficult, and you should try not to forget snacks and magazin...
ANNE LAMOTT

Most marriages are a mess, and the children get caught between two bitter, antagonistic parents. My ...
ANNE LAMOTT

The Giants are usually described as rag tag, kind of a great garage sale team, and the Democrats are...
ANNE LAMOTT

I'm drawn to almost any piece of writing with the words 'divine love' and 'impeachme...
ANNE LAMOTT

I think Jesus is divine love manifest on Earth, as it comes through the community of Christians.
ANNE LAMOTT

Age has given me the gift of me; it just gave me what I was always longing for, which was to get to ...
ANNE LAMOTT

I love readings and my readers, but the din of voices of the audience gives me stage fright, and the...
ANNE LAMOTT

Your experiences will be yours alone. But truth and best friendship will rarely if ever disappoint y...
ANNE LAMOTT

I wish I had thrown out the bathroom scale at age 16. Weighing yourself every morning is like waking...
ANNE LAMOTT

A whole lot of us believers, of all different religions, are ready to turn back the tide of madness ...
ANNE LAMOTT

Usually if you pray from the heart, you get an answer—the phone rings or the mail comes, and light...
ANNE LAMOTT

You will lose someone you can’t live without,and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news...
ANNE LAMOTT

I thought such awful thoughts that I cannot even say them out loud because they would make Jesus wan...
ANNE LAMOTT

I woke up full of hate and fear the day before the most recent peace march in San Francisco. This wa...
ANNE LAMOTT

I've heard that our greatest cross to carry is ourselves - how gravely we fall short.
ANNE LAMOTT

Most of me was glad when my mother died. She was a handful, but not in a cute, festive way. More in ...
ANNE LAMOTT

I go to church every Sunday, which is like going to the gas station once a week and really, really f...
ANNE LAMOTT

I don't have very sophisticated taste in music. I listen to a lot of folk music. I like reggae.
ANNE LAMOTT

I've heard people say that God is the gift of desperation, and there's a lot to be said for ...
ANNE LAMOTT

No one tells you that your life is effectively over when you have a child: that you're never goi...
ANNE LAMOTT

My mother's eyes were large and brown, like my son's, but unlike Sam's, they were always...
ANNE LAMOTT

I have a lot of faith. But I am also afraid a lot, and have no real certainty about anything. I reme...
ANNE LAMOTT

My parents, and librarians along the way, taught me about the space between words; about the margins...
ANNE LAMOTT

My coming to faith did not start with a leap but rather a series of staggers from what seemed like o...
ANNE LAMOTT

For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that o...
ANNE LAMOTT

There's a lovely Hasidic story of a rabbi who always told his people that if they studied the Torah,...
ANNE LAMOTT

We all know we're going to die; what's important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of ...
ANNE LAMOTT

All the older people who are thriving have stayed physically active — there are exceptions, and ev...
ANNE LAMOTT

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

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

A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way.
ANNE LAMOTT

I wish grace and healing were more abracadabra kind of things. Also, that delicate silver bells woul...
ANNE LAMOTT

But you can’t get to any of these truths by sitting in a field smiling beatifically, avoiding your...
ANNE LAMOTT

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of l...
ANNE LAMOTT

And I felt like my heart had been so thoroughly and irreparably broken that there could be no real j...
ANNE LAMOTT

If you are a writer, or want to be a writer, this is how you spend your days--listening, observing, ...
ANNE LAMOTT

Toni Morrison said, "The function of freedom is to free someone else," and if you are no longer wrac...
ANNE LAMOTT

My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I’m grateful for it the way I’m grateful for the oce...
ANNE LAMOTT

[S]he believed that the Buddhists were right–that if you want, you will suffer; if you love, you w...
ANNE LAMOTT

If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be un...
ANNE LAMOTT

I think joy and sweetness and affection are a spiritual path. We're here to know God, to love and se...
ANNE LAMOTT

Why couldn't Jesus command us to obsess over everything, to try to control and manipulate people, to...
ANNE LAMOTT

I've given guys blow jobs just because I've run out of things to talk about.'
Oh, Rae. Who hasn...
ANNE LAMOTT

Joy is the best makeup.
ANNE LAMOTT

I am all the ages I've ever been.
ANNE LAMOTT

Laughter is carbonated holiness.
ANNE LAMOTT

It's good to do uncomfortable things. It's weight training for life.
ANNE LAMOTT

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

The depth of the feeling continued to surprise and threaten me, but each time it hit again and I bor...
ANNE LAMOTT

It's funny: I always imagined when I was a kid that adults had some kind of inner toolbox full of sh...
ANNE LAMOTT

Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you're conscious and writing from a place of ins...
ANNE LAMOTT

I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of...
ANNE LAMOTT

Nothing heals us like letting people know our scariest parts: When people listen to you cry and lame...
ANNE LAMOTT

All the older people who are thriving have stayed physically active there are exceptions, and eve...
ANNE LAMOTT

I'm kind of a gossip hound, but watching the media whip the small fires into giant forest fires ...
ANNE LAMOTT

One secret of life is that the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts o...
ANNE LAMOTT

... the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day. [pp. 65...
ANNE LAMOTT

This is the most profound spiritual truth I know: that even when we're most sure that love can't con...
ANNE LAMOTT

I was raised by my parents to believe that you had a moral obligation to try and help save the world...
ANNE LAMOTT

I was terrified of death by the time I was three or four, actively if not lucidly. I had frequent ni...
ANNE LAMOTT

And as it turns out, if one person is praying for you, buckle up. Things can happen.
ANNE LAMOTT

I am not writing to try and convert people to fundamental Christianity. I am just trying to share my...
ANNE LAMOTT

We cheated, you and me, and someone noticed. I noticed you; someone else noticed me. It hurts us. Th...
ANNE LAMOTT

We're often ashamed of asking for so much help because it seems selfish or petty or narcissistic...
ANNE LAMOTT

If you don't believe in God, it may help to remember this great line of Geneen Roth's: that awarenes...
ANNE LAMOTT

You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing ...
ANNE LAMOTT

Sometimes this human stuff is slimy and pathetic...but better to feel it and talk about it and walk ...
ANNE LAMOTT

The opposite of faith is not doubt, it’s certainty.
ANNE LAMOTT

I liked those ladies! They were helpers, and they danced.' These are the words I want on my gravesto...
ANNE LAMOTT

Your problem is how you are going to spend this one and precious life you have been issued. Whether ...
ANNE LAMOTT

So how on earth can I bring a child into the world, knowing that such sorrow lies ahead, that it is ...
ANNE LAMOTT

he gets this glinty Donald Trump look in his eyes, like in the old cartoons where someone gets a gre...
ANNE LAMOTT

They ask that we pray for their families, and for kinder leaders, and for the homeless, and people w...
ANNE LAMOTT

He said that when he sees little kids sitting in the backseat of cars, in those car seats that have ...
ANNE LAMOTT

When Sam’s having a hard time and being a total baby about the whole thing, I feel so much frustra...
ANNE LAMOTT

I heard an old man speak once, someone who had been sober for fifty years, a very prominent doctor. ...
ANNE LAMOTT

All these people keep waxing sentimental about how fabulously well I am doing as a mother, how compe...
ANNE LAMOTT

Oh, but my stomach, she is like a waterbed covered in flannel. When I lie on my side in bed, my stom...
ANNE LAMOTT

I have these secret pangs of shame about being single, like I wasn't good enough to get a husband. R...
ANNE LAMOTT

So Rita and I decided that the most subversive, revolutionary thing I could do was to show up for my...
ANNE LAMOTT

I cry intermittently, like a summer rain. I don't feel racked by the crying; in fact, it hydrates me...
ANNE LAMOTT

I guess he'll have to figure out someday that he is supposed to have this dark side, that it is part...
ANNE LAMOTT

...one of the worst things about being a parent, for me, is the self-discovery, the being face to fa...
ANNE LAMOTT

I think we're all pretty crazy on this bus. I'm not sure I know anyone who's got all the dots on his...
ANNE LAMOTT

I’m probably just as good a mother as the next repressed, obsessive-compulsive paranoiac.
ANNE LAMOTT

one thing about having a baby is that each step of the way you simply cannot imagine loving him any ...
ANNE LAMOTT

So how on earth can I bring a child into the world, knowing that such sorrow lies ahead, that it is ...
ANNE LAMOTT

Part of me loves and respects men so desperately, and part of me thinks they are so embarrassingly i...
ANNE LAMOTT

It is a violation of trust to use your kids as caulking for the cracks in you.
ANNE LAMOTT

One thing I know for sure about raising children is that every single day a kid needs discipline.......
ANNE LAMOTT

I realized I was going to get through this disappointing service, and anyway, you have to be somewhe...
ANNE LAMOTT

For twenty years I have ached to go back home, when there was nobody there to whom I could return.
ANNE LAMOTT

Courage is fear that has said its prayers.
ANNE LAMOTT

I know that sometimes these friends feel that they have been expelled from the ordinary world they l...
ANNE LAMOTT

Without using the word, everyone started forgiving each other again. Just like that, from the no of ...
ANNE LAMOTT

This is the most profound spiritual truth I know: that even when we're most sure that love can't con...
ANNE LAMOTT

And my fear of failure has been lifelong and deep. If you are what you do- and I think my parents ma...
ANNE LAMOTT

Now she and I sit together in her room and eat chocolate, and I tell her that in a very long time wh...
ANNE LAMOTT

When you make friends with fear, it can’t rule you.
ANNE LAMOTT

There is nothing more touching to me then a family picture where everyone is trying to look his or h...
ANNE LAMOTT

I think that is why we stay close to our families, no matter how neurotic the members, how deeply an...
ANNE LAMOTT

I smiled back at her. I thought such awful thoughts that I cannot even say them out loud because the...
ANNE LAMOTT

Grief, as I read somewhere once, is a lazy Susan. One day it is heavy and underwater, and the next d...
ANNE LAMOTT

I don’t know why life isn’t constructed to be seamless and safe, why we make such glaring mistak...
ANNE LAMOTT

Who was it who said that forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a different past?
ANNE LAMOTT

Mine was a patchwork God, sewn together from bits of rag and ribbon, Eastern and Western, pagan and ...
ANNE LAMOTT

[Her] work taught me that you could be all the traditional feminine things -- a mother, a lover, a l...
ANNE LAMOTT

It's so awful, attacking your child. It's the worse thing I know, to shout loudly at this 50 lb. bei...
ANNE LAMOTT

The thing about light is that it really isn’t yours; it’s what you gather and shine back. And it...
ANNE LAMOTT

...music is about as physical as it gets: your essential rhythm is your heartbeat; your essential so...
ANNE LAMOTT

...most of the time, all you have is the moment, and the imperfect love of the people around you.
ANNE LAMOTT

It is unearned love--the love that goes before, that greets us on the way. It's the help you receive...
ANNE LAMOTT

My heart was broken and my head was just barely inhabitable
ANNE LAMOTT

...because when people have seen you at their worst, you don't have to put on the mask as much.
ANNE LAMOTT

Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue
ANNE LAMOTT

During Advent, we have to sit in our own anxiety and funkiness long enough to know what a Promised L...
ANNE LAMOTT

We can see Spirit made visible when people are kind to one another, especially when it's a really bu...
ANNE LAMOTT

Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some l...
ANNE LAMOTT

Her purse was a weight, ballast; it tethered her to the earth as her mind floated away.
ANNE LAMOTT

... one of the immutable laws of being human is that the people who show up are the right people. [p...
ANNE LAMOTT

But you don't always get what you want;,you get what you get
ANNE LAMOTT

What you're looking for is already inside you. You've heard this before, but the holy thing inside y...
ANNE LAMOTT

If you haven't already, you will lose someone you can't live without, and your heart will be badly b...
ANNE LAMOTT

... everyone has come to understand that unconditional love is a reality, but with as shelf life of ...
ANNE LAMOTT

When we did art with the kids, the demons would lie down.
ANNE LAMOTT

Age has given me what I was looking for my entire life - it has given me me . It has provide...
ANNE LAMOTT

You want to protect your child from pain, and what you get instead is life, and grace; and though th...
ANNE LAMOTT

Rule 1: When all else fails, follow instructions. And Rule 2: Don't be an asshole.
ANNE LAMOTT

Rest and laughter are the most spiritual and subversive acts of all. Laugh, rest, slow down.
ANNE LAMOTT

I'm here to be me, which is taking a great deal longer than I had hoped.
ANNE LAMOTT

This is one thing they forget to mention in most child-rearing books, that at times you will just lo...
ANNE LAMOTT

Certainty is missing the point entirely.
ANNE LAMOTT

Help" is a prayer that is always answered. It doesn't matter how you pray--with your head bowed in s...
ANNE LAMOTT

Forgiveness means it finally becomes unimportant that you hit back. You're done. It doesn't necessar...
ANNE LAMOTT

Hope is not about proving anything. It's about choosing to believe this one thing, that love is bigg...
ANNE LAMOTT

A good marriage is where both people feel like they're getting the better end of the deal.
ANNE LAMOTT

Underneath all things means that beneath the floorboards, in the depths, in the spaces between the p...
ANNE LAMOTT

These are the words I want on my gravestone: that I was a helper, and that I danced."

ANNE LAMOTT

I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who...
ANNE LAMOTT

But how?" my students ask. "How do you actually do it?"
You sit down, I say. You try to sit do...
ANNE LAMOTT

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

Your problem is how you are going to spend this one odd and precious life you have been issued. Whet...
ANNE LAMOTT

I got a lot of things that society had promised would make me whole and fulfilled - all the things t...
ANNE LAMOTT

رفض ما دون الكمال ، ينطوي على كثير من الظلم والعداء للإ�...
ANNE LAMOTT

I didn't write about my mother much in the third year after she died. I was still trying to get ...
ANNE LAMOTT

I like the desert for short periods of time, from inside a car, with the windows rolled up, and the ...
ANNE LAMOTT

When I was a kid, our family used to watch 'Bonanza.' I really liked having a Sunday night T...
ANNE LAMOTT

I used to love to untangle chains when I was a child. I had thin, busy fingers, and I never gave up....
ANNE LAMOTT

A good marriage is supposed to be one where each spouse secretly thinks he or she got the better dea...
ANNE LAMOTT

See how the fearful chandelier Trembles above you Each time you open your mouth To sing. Sing. —DO...
ANNE LAMOTT

After a while the middle-aged person who lives in her head begins to talk to her soul, the kid.
ANNE LAMOTT

Perfectionism means that you try not to leave so much mess to clean up. But clutter and mess show us...
ANNE LAMOTT

Anne Lamott

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