Anne Lamott

Anne Lamott (born 10 April 1954) is an American novelist and non-fiction writer.

I thought the secret of life was obvious: be here now, love as if your whole life depended on it, find your life's work, and try to get hold of a giant panda.

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.

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

Quotes

This here is what I done got. This is what me being alive looks like now.

* I try to write the books I would love to come upon, that are honest, concerned with real lives, human hearts, spiritual transformation, families, secrets, wonder, craziness—and that can make me laugh. When I am reading a book like this, I feel rich and profoundly relieved to be in the presence of someone who will share the truth with me, and throw the lights on a little, and I try to write these kinds of books. Books, for me, are medicine.

• • Originally posted to the Religion Blog of the Dallas Morning News in 2008.

• ..I thought the secret of life was obvious: be here now, love as if your whole life depended on it, find your life's work, and try to get hold of a giant panda.
  • Hard Laughter

• 100 years from now? All new people.
  • All New People

• 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.
  • Traveling Mercies; on page 22 of Bird by Bird she attributes this to "my priest friend Tom"

• Not forgiving is like drinking rat poison, and then waiting around for the rat to die.
  • Traveling Mercies

• Laughter is carbonated holiness.
  • Plan B

• The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns. Faith also means reaching deeply within, for the sense one was born with, the sense, for example, to go for a walk.
  • Plan B

• When you're conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader.
  • Bird by Bird

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

• Joy is the best makeup.
  • Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith

• Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.
  • Facebook post, 4/8/15

• So Rita and I decided that the most subversive, revolutionary thing I could do was to show up for my life and not be ashamed.
  • Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year

"The dressing-room encounter that made me get real about aging" The Washington Post (December 20, 2023)

• Do I think the sky is falling? Sort of.

• The game of life is hard, and a lot of us are playing hurt.

• We know by a certain age the great palace lies of the culture — if you buy or do or achieve this or that, you will be happy and rich. Nope. Love and service make us rich.

• She had come planning to swim, which I hadn’t as the water is too cold for me, and she took off all her clothes, right there and then. “Do you feel shy?” I asked as she walked to the bank. “Nope. This here is what I done got. This is what me being alive looks like now."