Anne Lamott Quotes

...the three things I cannot change are the past, the truth, and you.

Don’t underestimate this gift of finding a place in the writing world: if you really work at describing creatively on paper the truth as you understand it, as you have experienced it, with the people or material who are in you, who are asking that you help them get written, you will come to a secret feeling of honor.

Joy is the best makeup.

If courage is not there, if the possibility of things getting better is not there, listen a little harder.

I know nothing, except what everyone knows — if there when grace dances, I should dance.

There is ecstasy in paying attention.

...that grace is having a commitment to - or at least an acceptance of - being ineffective and foolish.

The truth is that your spirits don't rise until you get way down.

Mark Twain said that Adam was the only man who, when he said a good thing, knew that nobody had said it before.

Lies cannot nourish or protect you. Only freedom from fear, freedom from lies, can make us beautiful, and keep us safe.

"And what do you do in the face of this powerlessness? As a parent?"

"You get to be obsessed and angry," Tom said. "And they get to be the age they are, and act like teenagers if they want to. There is a zero-percent chance you will change them. So we breathe in, and out, talk to friends, as needed. We show up, wear clean underwear, say hello to strangers. We plant bulbs, and pick up litter, knowing there will be more in twenty minutes. We pray that we might cooperate with any flicker of light we can find in the world."

Peace is joy at rest. Joy is peace on its feet.

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

I heard an old man speak once, someone who had been sober for fifty years, a very prominent doctor. He said that he’d finally figured out a few years ago that his profound sense of control, in the world and over his life, is another addiction and a total illusion. He said that when he sees little kids sitting in the back seat of cars, in those car seats that have steering wheels, with grim expressions of concentration on their faces, clearly convinced that their efforts are causing the car to do whatever it is doing, he thinks of himself and his relationship with God: God who drives along silently, gently amused, in the real driver's seat.

Very few writers really know what they are doing until they’ve done it.