Quote

Here are the two best prayers I know: 'Help me, help me, help me,' and 'Thank you, thank you, thank you.' A woman I know says, for her morning prayer, 'Whatever,' and then for the evening, 'Oh, well,' but has conceded that these prayers are more palatable for people without children.

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
Wells
Prayer
Without
Morning
Help
Palatable
Well
Whatever
Conceded
Children
Woman
Prayers
People
Helping
Evening
Two
Thank
Best
Says

More quotes by Anne Lamott

Image
...one of the worst things about being a parent, for me, is the self-discovery, the being face to face with one's secret insanity and brokenness and rage.
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
Image
There are these people who keep taking you in and feeding you and loving you and making the world a tiny bit safer than it feels. People have community and family, but existentially we are deeply isolated.
Anne Lamott
Image
...the three things I cannot change are the past, the truth, and you.
Anne Lamott
Image
The beauty of modesty ... a virtue the world doesn't have much truck with: one ordinary flower in a vase, as opposed to a bouquet.
Anne Lamott
Image
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.
Anne Lamott
Image
I was the angriest daughter on earth, and also, one of the most devoted.
Anne Lamott
Image
[Her] work taught me that you could be all the traditional feminine things -- a mother, a lover, a listener, a nurturer -- and you could also be critically astute and radical and have a minority opinion that was profoundly moral.
Anne Lamott
Image
My understanding is that you get to choose which of your thoughts to go with.
Anne Lamott
Image
It's incredibly touching when someone who seems so hopeless finds a few inches of light to stand in and makes everything work as well as possible. All of us lurch and fall, sit in the dirt, are helped to our feet, keep moving, feel like idiots, lose our balance, gain it, help others get back on their feet, and keep going.
Anne Lamott
Image
Publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is.
Anne Lamott
Image
Mothers are supposed to listen and, afterward, to respond with some wisdom and perspective, but these things were not my mother's strong suit.
Anne Lamott
Image
The solution is always spiritual, and it almost never has anything to do with the problem ... laughter is carbonated holiness.
Anne Lamott
Image
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.
Anne Lamott
Image
You have to be a warrior and say, Maybe it's everyone else's system, but it's not mine. (from her recent interview here, on Goodreads)
Anne Lamott
Image
Everyone is flailing through this life without an owner's manual, with whatever modicum of grace and good humor we can manage.
Anne Lamott
Image
My theology is based on what I tell my Sunday-school kids - that they are loved and chosen, AS IS, now, today. That the moment is holy, sacred, and all there is - and that we are only as sick as our secrets. So TELL IT.
Anne Lamott
Image
You have to make mistakes to find out who you aren't. You take the action, and the insight follows: You don't think your way into becoming yourself.
Anne Lamott
Image
To love yourself as you are is a miracle, and to seek yourself is to have found yourself for now. And now is all we have, and love is who we are.
Anne Lamott
Image
Sometimes this human stuff is slimy and pathetic...but better to feel it and talk about it and walk through it than to spend a lifetime being silently poisoned.
Anne Lamott