Anne Sumner > Anne's Quotes

“I worry that Jesus drinks himself to sleep when he hears me talk like this.”
― Anne Lamott

“Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue”
― Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith

“...since you can't heal your own sick mind with your own sick mind, I needed to consult somebody else's sick mind.”
― Anne Lamott

“...because 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

“Sometimes grace works like water wings when you feel you are sinking.”
― Anne Lamott, Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith

“The depth of the feeling continued to surprise and threaten me, but each time it hit again and I bore it...I would discover that it hadn't washed me away.”
― Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith

“Forgiveness means it finally becomes unimportant that you hit back. You're done. It doesn't necessarily mean that you want to have lunch with the person. If you keep hitting back, you stay trapped in the nightmare...”
― Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

“If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act—truth is always subversive.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said that 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.)”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“The problem is acceptance, which is something we're taught not to do. We're taught to improve uncomfortable situations, to change things, alleviate unpleasant feelings. But if you accept the reality that you have been given- that you are not in a productive creative period- you free yourself to begin filling up again.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“The society to which we belong seems to be dying or is already dead. I don't mean to sound dramatic, but clearly the dark side is rising. Things could not have been more odd and frightening in the Middle Ages. But the tradition of artists will continue no matter what form the society takes. And this is another reason to write: people need us, to mirror for them and for each other without distortion-not to look around and say, 'Look at yourselves, you idiots!,' but to say, 'This is who we are.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“And she is going to dance, dance hungry, dance full, dance each cold astonishing moment, now when she is young and again when she is old.”
― Anne Lamott

“You can tell if people are following Jesus, because they are feeding the poor, sharing their wealth, and trying to get everyone medical insurance.”
― Anne Lamott

“I remember staring at my son endlessly when he was an infant, stunned by his very existence, wondering where on earth he had come from.”
― Anne Lamott, Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith

“It was not facing what life dealt that made you crazy, but rather trying to set life straight where it was unstraightenable.”
― Anne Lamott, Blue Shoe

“Sam said to me the other day, "I love you like 20 tyrannosauruses on 20 mountaintops," and this is the exact same way in which I love him.”
― Anne Lamott

“[Her] work taught me that you could be all the traditional feminine things -- a mother, a lover, a listener, a nurturer -- and you could also be critically astute and radical and have a minority opinion that was profoundly moral.”
― Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith

“It feels like I'm babysitting in the Twilight Zone. I keep waiting for the parents to show up because we are out of chips and diet cokes.”
― Anne Lamott

“So how on earth can I bring a child into the world, knowing that such sorrow lies ahead, that it is such a large part of what it means to be human?
I'm not sure. That's my answer: I'm not sure.”
― Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year

“Who was it who said that forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a different past?”
― Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith

“I was usually filled with a sense of something like shame until I'd remember that wonderful line of Blake's- that we are here to learn to endure the beams of love- and I would take a long deep breath and force these words out of my strangulated throat: "Thank you.”
― Anne Lamott

“She said to go ahead and feel the feelings. I did. They felt like shit.”
― Anne Lamott

“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.”
― Anne Lamott

“Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there.”
― Anne Lamott

“Being enough was going to have to be an inside job.”
― Anne Lamott

“My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I’m grateful for it the way I’m grateful for the ocean.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“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.”
― Anne Lamott

“The difference between you and God is that God doesn't think He's you. ”
― Anne Lamott

“Peace is joy at rest. Joy is peace on its feet.”
― Anne Lamott

“Sometimes grace is a ribbon of mountain air that gets in through the cracks.”
― Anne Lamott, Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith