Quote

They always threw their arms around and hugged me while crying our Yiddish endearments. Yet none of them believed in God. They believed in social justice, good works, Israel, and Bette Midler. I was nearly thirty before I met a religious Jew.

Anne Lamott

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Anne Lamott
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: April 10
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Always
None
Crying
Works
Jew
Arms
Nearly
Endearments
Justice
Thirty
Bette
Religious
Believed
Endearment
Social
Mets
Hugged
Around
Israel
Yiddish
Good
Cry
Threw

More quotes by Anne Lamott

Image
I wish grace and healing were more abracadabra kind of things. Also, that delicate silver bells would ring to announce grace's arrival. But no, it's clog and slog and scootch, on the floor, in the silence, in the dark.
Anne Lamott
Image
Again and again I tell God I need help, and God says, 'Well, isn't that fabulous? Because I need help too. So you go get that old woman over there some water, and I'll figure out what we're going to do about your stuff.
Anne Lamott
Image
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.
Anne Lamott
Image
Certainty is missing the point entirely.
Anne Lamott
Image
And that almost everyone was struggling to wake up, to be loved, and not feel so afraid all the time. That's what the cars, degrees, booze, and drugs were about.
Anne Lamott
Image
All these people keep waxing sentimental about how fabulously well I am doing as a mother, how competent I am, but I feel inside like when you're first learning to put nail polish on your right hand with your left. You can do it, but it doesn't look all that great around the cuticles.
Anne Lamott
Image
I became a Christian before I got sober. So I was a drunk, bulimic Christian.
Anne Lamott
Image
No one can appropriate God, goodness, the Bible or Jesus. It just seems that way.
Anne Lamott
Image
And you try to quiet your mind so you can hear.
Anne Lamott
Image
Tell the truth as you understand it. If you're a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act - truth is always subversive.
Anne Lamott
Image
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.
Anne Lamott
Image
You have to keep taking the next necessary stitch, and the next one, and the next. Without stitches, you just have rags. And we are not rags.
Anne Lamott
Image
There is something so tender about this to me, about being willing to have your makeup wash off, your eyes tear up, your nose start to run. Its tender partly because it harkens back to infancy, to your mother washing your face with love and lots or water, tending to you, making you clean all over again.
Anne Lamott
Image
Pets are the world to me. I think they are the most obvious manifestations of divine love that we are going to see this side of eternity.
Anne Lamott
Image
Anne Lamott’s priest friend Tom, how to get through: Left foot, right foot, left foot, breathe, he said. Right foot, left foot, right foot, breathe. Salon April 25, 2003
Anne Lamott
Image
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.
Anne Lamott
Image
My best teachers were mess, failure, death, mistakes, and the people I hated, including myself.
Anne Lamott
Image
Radical self-care is quantum, and radiates out into the atmosphere, like a little fresh air.
Anne Lamott
Image
Churches are good for prayer, but so are garages and cars and mountains and showers and dance floors.
Anne Lamott
Image
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.
Anne Lamott