- Nov 07, 2020
Anne Lamott Quotes
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- Last Updated on May 30, 2021
- Perfectionism
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- Nov 07, 2020
Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor.
- People
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Life
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- Nov 07, 2020
We must not inflict life on children who will be resented; we must not inflict unwanted children on society.
- Floats
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- Nov 07, 2020
When hope is not pinned wriggling onto a shiny image or expectation, it sometimes floats forth and opens.
- Leave
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Four
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- Nov 07, 2020
I've written six novels and four pieces of nonfiction, so I don't really have a genre these days.
- Dress
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- Nov 07, 2020
Seeing yourself in print is such an amazing concept: you can get so much attention without having to actually show up somewhere... You don't have to dress up, for instance, and you can't hear them boo you right away.
- Big Hair
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- Nov 07, 2020
It was simple reality - most competitive tennis players in my day were privileged, spoiled, entitled and white. Also, many of them were beautiful, fit, tan and of good stock - great big hair and white teeth and long legs. Then there were the rest of us.
- Being
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- Nov 07, 2020
The Giants are usually described as rag tag, kind of a great garage sale team, and the Democrats are described as the Mommies to the Republican Daddies; and everyone hates the mommies, but wait, wait - I didn't intend to get into the pathos and thrill of being a Democratic Giants fan.
- Day
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- Nov 07, 2020
No one is more sentimentalized in America than mothers on Mother's Day, but no one is more often blamed for the culture's bad people and behavior.
- Love
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- Nov 07, 2020
You want to give me chocolate and flowers? That would be great. I love them both. I just don't want them out of guilt, and I don't want them if you're not going to give them to all the people who helped mother our children.
- Life
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Love
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Mother
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- Nov 07, 2020
Bananas are great, as I believe them to be the only known cure for existential dread. Also, Mother Teresa said that in India, a woman dying in the street will share her banana with anyone who needs it, whereas in America, people amass and hoard as many bananas as they can to sell for an exorbitant profit. So half of them go bad, anyway.
- Flower
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- Nov 07, 2020
My mother's eyes were large and brown, like my son's, but unlike Sam's, they were always frantic, like a hummingbird who can't quite find the flower but keeps jabbing around.
- Clue
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- Nov 07, 2020
I see that children fill the existential hollowness many people feel; that when we have children, we know they will need us, and maybe love us, but we don't have a clue how hard it is going to be.
- Egyptians
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- Nov 07, 2020
We can't understand when we're pregnant, or when our siblings are expecting, how profound it is to have a shared history with a younger generation: blood, genes, humor. It means we were actually here, on Earth, for a time - like the Egyptians with their pyramids, only with children.
- Mother
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- Nov 07, 2020
I didn't write about my mother much in the third year after she died. I was still trying to get my argument straight: When her friends or our relatives wondered why I was still so hard on her, I could really lay out the case for what it had been like to be raised by someone who had loathed herself, her husband, even her own name.
- God
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- Nov 07, 2020
No one can appropriate God, goodness, the Bible or Jesus. It just seems that way.
- God
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- Nov 07, 2020
The first holy truth in God 101 is that men and women of true faith have always had to accept the mystery of God's identity and love and ways. I hate that, but it's the truth.
- Life
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- Nov 07, 2020
A whole lot of us believers, of all different religions, are ready to turn back the tide of madness by walking together, in both the dark and the light - in other words, through life - registering voters as we go, and keeping the faith.
- Hairs
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- Nov 07, 2020
When we're dealing with the people in our family - no matter how annoying or gross they may be, no matter how self-inflicted their suffering may appear, no matter how afflicted they are with ignorance, prejudice or nose hairs - we give from the deepest parts of ourselves.
- Long
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- Nov 07, 2020
I would seriously rather be in a long line at the DMV than eat with people I don't know.
- Great
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- Nov 07, 2020
It's a great time to be alive.
- Must
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- Nov 07, 2020
I used to tell my writing students that they must write the books they wished they could come upon - because then the books they hungered and thirsted for would exist.
- Nov 07, 2020
I hate the summer.
- Music
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Joy
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- Nov 07, 2020
These days cry out, as never before, for us to pay attention, so we can move through them and get our joy and pride back.
- Best
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- Nov 07, 2020
Your experiences will be yours alone. But truth and best friendship will rarely if ever disappoint you.
- Love
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- Nov 07, 2020
Nothing heals us like letting people know our scariest parts: When people listen to you cry and lament, and look at you with love, it's like they are holding the baby of you.
- Good Old Days
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Beauty
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- Nov 07, 2020
Pay attention to the beauty surrounding you.
- Light
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- Nov 07, 2020
Summer nearly does me in every year. It's too hot and the light is unforgiving and the days go on way too long.
- Component
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- Nov 07, 2020
I used to love to untangle chains when I was a child. I had thin, busy fingers, and I never gave up. Perhaps there was a psychiatric component to my concentration but like much of my psychic damage, this worked to everyone's advantage.
- Me
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- Nov 07, 2020
My mother might find a thin gold chain at the back of a drawer, wadded into an impossibly tight knot, and give it to me to untangle. It would have a shiny, sweaty smell, and excite me: Gold chains linked you to the great fairy tales and myths, to Arabia, and India; to the great weight of the world, but lighter than a feather.
- Person
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- Nov 07, 2020
I've known for years that resentments don't hurt the person we resent, but they do hurt us.
- Hope
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- Nov 07, 2020
Most of me was glad when my mother died. She was a handful, but not in a cute, festive way. More in a life-threatening way, that had caused me a long time ago to give up all hope of ever feeling good about having had her as a mother.
- Life
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- Nov 07, 2020
I spent my whole life helping my mother carry around her psychic trunks like a bitter bellhop. So a great load was lifted when she died, and my life was much easier.
- College
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- Nov 07, 2020
I accidentally forgot to graduate from college.
- College
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- Nov 07, 2020
I went to Goucher College in Maryland for the best possible reasons - to learn - but then I dropped out at 19 for the best possible reasons - to become a writer.
- Life
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- Nov 07, 2020
Your problem is how you are going to spend this one odd and precious life you have been issued. Whether you're going to spend it trying to look good and creating the illusion that you have power over people and circumstances, or whether you are going to taste it, enjoy it and find out the truth about who you are.
- Doors
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- Nov 07, 2020
I like the desert for short periods of time, from inside a car, with the windows rolled up, and the doors locked. I prefer beach resorts with room service.
- Life
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- Nov 07, 2020
Some people seem to understand this - that life and change take time - but I am not one of those people.
- Flowers
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Moon
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Life
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- Nov 07, 2020
My parents, and librarians along the way, taught me about the space between words; about the margins, where so many juicy moments of life and spirit and friendship could be found. In a library, you could find miracles and truth and you might find something that would make you laugh so hard that you get shushed, in the friendliest way.
- Feeling
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- Nov 07, 2020
I woke up full of hate and fear the day before the most recent peace march in San Francisco. This was disappointing: I'd hoped to wake up feeling somewhere between Virginia Woolf and Wavy Gravy.
- Gardening
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- Nov 07, 2020
The earth is rocky and full of roots; it's clay, and it seems doomed and polluted, but you dig little holes for the ugly shriveled bulbs, throw in a handful of poppy seeds, and cover it all over, and you know you'll never see it again - it's death and clay and shrivel, and your hands are nicked from the rocks, your nails black with soil.
- I Am
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- Nov 07, 2020
I love readings and my readers, but the din of voices of the audience gives me stage fright, and the din of voices inside whisper that I am a fraud, and that the jig is up. Surely someone will rise up from the audience and say out loud that not only am I not funny and helpful, but I'm annoying, and a phony.
- Me
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- Nov 07, 2020
The whistle is always waiting to be blown, and in some ways, it gets me to do better work.
- Book Tour
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- Nov 07, 2020
Being on a book tour is like being on the seesaw when you're a little kid. The excitement is in having someone to play with, and in rising up in the air, but then you're at the mercy of those holding you down, and if it's your older brother, or Paul Wolfowitz, they leap up, so that you crash down and get hurt.
- More
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- Nov 07, 2020
If our lives are made up of a string of a thousand moments, at some of those moments we look a lot more spiritually evolved than at others.
- Only
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- Nov 07, 2020
The worst part about celebrating another birthday is the shock that you're only as well as you are.
- Feel
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- Nov 07, 2020
Some people won't go the extra mile, and then on their birthday, when no one makes a fuss, they feel neglected and bitter.
- Life
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- Nov 07, 2020
Presents can make up for some of the disappointments that life doles out, such as it makes almost no sense and is coming to an end more quickly than ever.
- Fear
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Parents
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- Nov 07, 2020
I was raised by my parents to believe that you had a moral obligation to try and help save the world.
- Poor
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- Nov 07, 2020
I loved every second of Catholic church. I loved the sickly sweet rotting-pomegranate smells of the incense. I loved the overwrought altar, the birdbath of holy water, the votive candles; I loved that there was a poor box, the stations of the cross rendered in stained glass on the windows.
- Family
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- Nov 07, 2020
I was raised in a family where none of us ever raised a voice, so there was no room to express feelings of rage or even unabashed joy - a little bashed joy, here or there, or being mildly disgruntled.
- Life
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- Nov 07, 2020
The women's movement burst forth when I was fifteen. That was when I began to believe that life might semi-work out after all. The cavalry had arrived. Women were starting to say that you got to tell the truth now, that you had to tell the truth if you were going to heal and have an authentic life.
- Job
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- Nov 07, 2020
I quit my last real job, as a writer at a magazine, when I was twenty-one. That was the moment when I lost my place of prestige on the fast track, and slowly, millimeter by millimeter, I started to get found, to discover who I had been born to be, instead of the impossibly small package, all tied up tightly in myself, that I had agreed to be.
- American Way
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- Nov 07, 2020
The American way is to not need help, but to help.
- I Am
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- Nov 07, 2020
I am skittish about relationships, as most of the marriages I've seen up close have been ruinous for one or both parties.
- Good
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- God
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- Nov 07, 2020
We're often ashamed of asking for so much help because it seems selfish or petty or narcissistic, but I think, if there's a God - and I believe there is - that God is there to help. That's what God's job is.
- Christmas
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- Nov 07, 2020
My mother was a not-too-devoted atheist. She went to Episcopal church on Christmas Eve every year, and that was mostly it.
- Peace
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- Nov 07, 2020