Anne Lamott Quotes

The reason I never give up hope is because everything is so basically hopeless.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Sometimes I think God loves the ones who most desperately ache and are most desperately lost – his or her wildest, most messed-up children – the way you’d ache and love a screwed-up rebel daughter in juvenile hall.

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.

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.

It’s a great time to be alive.

E-books are great for instant gratification – you see a review somewhere of a book that interests you, and you can start reading it five minutes later.

Some people won’t go the extra mile, and then on their birthday, when no one makes a fuss, they feel neglected and bitter.

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.

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.

I have a very dark sense of humor. I swear. I have a very playful relationship with Jesus.

Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns.

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