Anne Lamott Quotes

“...the three things I cannot change are the past, the truth, and you.”
― Anne Lamott, Help Thanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayers

“You own everything that happend to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.
-- Anne Lamott”
― Doreen Carvajal

“Toni Morrison said, "The function of freedom is to free someone else," and if you are no longer wracked or in bondage to a person or a way of life, tell your story. Risk freeing someone else. Not everyone will be glad that you did. Members of your family and other critics may wish you had kept your secrets. Oh, well, what are you going to do? Get it all down. Let it pour out of you and onto the page. Write an incredibly shitty, self-indulgent, whiny, mewling first draft. Then take out as many of the excesses as you can.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“A nun I know once told me she kept begging God to take her character defects away from her. After years of this prayer, God finally got back to her: I'm not going to take anything away from you, you have to give it to Me.”
― Anne Lamott, Help Thanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayers

“If we stay where we are, where we're stuck, where we're comfortable and safe, we die there... When nothing new can get in, that's death.”
― Anne Lamott, Help Thanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayers

“That's what's so touching about weddings: Two people fall in love, and decide to see if their love might stand up over time, if there might be enough grace and forgiveness and memory lapses to help the whole shebang hang together.”
― Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

“Grace to me is a little bit of extra help when you're feeling stuck or doomed or, probably, hopefully, out of good ideas on how to save yourself, and how to salvage the situation or the friendship or the whatever it is,” Anne Lamott once told me. “I wish it was accompanied by harp music so you could know that's what was happening, but for me it's that extra pause or that extra breath or that extra minute's patience against all odds.” On that first trip to Ireland, grace—the kick-in-the-pants, clarifying, cosmic-pause-button kind of grace—didn't just have a harp. It had an entire soundtrack...”
― Cathleen Falsani, Sin Boldly: A Field Guide for Grace

“If what God says is the truest thing about us, then it makes sense to follow him and accept our As-Is condition as the starting point. Thomas Merton said, 'The reason we never enter into the deepest reality of our relationship with God is that we so seldom acknowledge our utter nothingness before him.' If we confess the truth about ourselves, there's every reason to fear God will say, 'Yeah, that's right; and anotherthing...' and we're fairly sure there will be another thing. We are like people afraid to tell the doctor where we really hurt because we fear we may be sicker than we think.

We are sicker than we think. We're dying and, crazily, running from the healer because we're ashamed, because we hate ourselves for all we are and all we're not.”
― Brennan Manning

“Almost every single thing you hope publication will do for you is a fantasy, a hologram--it's the eagle on your credit card that only seems to soar.”
― Anne Lamott