Anne Lamott Quotes

Chaos is inherent in all compounded things. Strive on with diligence.

When you plan something, it never works.

It's so easy for all the success in the world to suddenly end, and I'm quite aware of that.

I have the purest intent when it comes to love. But it doesn't always work out that way. That's the truth. But you know, it's still pretty fun when you're in the moment.

When I was younger I thought I'd meet the man of my dreams, get married and have a child, but it all went higgledy-piggledy. Never say never, though.

Not everything in life can be interpreted metaphorically; that's because things fall out on the way.

You've got to bear it in mind that nobody that ever lived is specially privileged; the axe can fall at any moment, on any neck, without any warning or any regard for justice.

Sometimes, you have no idea why something works and other times, you put so much work and effort into something and it just falls flat.

Unfortunately, real life can’t be wrapped up with a nice little bow.

Death and disaster are at our shoulders every second of our lives, trying to get at us. Missing, a lot of the time. A lot of miles on the motorway without a front wheel blow-out. A lot of viruses that slither through our bodies without snagging. A lot of pianos that fall a minute after we've passed. Or a month, it makes no difference. So unless we're going to get down on our knees and give thanks every time disaster misses, it makes no sense to moan when it strikes.

Pull a string, a puppet moves ... each man must realize that it can all disappear very quickly: the cat, the woman, the job, the front tire, the bed, the walls, the room; all our necessities including love, rest on foundations of sand - and any given cause, no matter how unrelated: the death of a boy in Hong Kong or a blizzard in Omaha ... can serve as your undoing. all your chinaware crashing to the kitchen floor, your girl will enter and you'll be standing, drunk, in the center of it and she'll ask: my god, what's the matter? and you'll answer: I don't know, I don't know.

I held my heart back from positively accepting anything, since I was afraid of another fall, and in this condition of suspense I was being all the more killed.

Life is a whoopee cushion, a chair pulled away just as you were taking a seat.

What we take to be our strongest tower of delight, only stands at the caprice of the minutest event the falling of a leaf, the hearing of a voice, or the receipt of one little bit of paper scratched over with a few small characters by a sharpened feather.

Life's not perfect. Some loose ends may never get trimmed up and tidied.

"Stories don't always have happy endings." This stopped him. Because they didn't, did they? That's one thing the monster had definitely taught him. Stories were wild, wild animals and went off in directions you couldn't expect.

The future cannot be determined. It can only be experienced as it occurring. Life doesn't know what it will be until it notices what it has become.

There's a war on. We don't know how anything's going to end. We just have to grasp each fleeting moment of joy as it whizzes by.

There was no way to know that certainty would one day become a luxury, too.

Life doesn't often turn out the way we think it will, does it?

Nothing really ever happens like you imagine it will.

That is life. Just one long succession of misunderstandings and rash acts and what not. Absolutely.

The events we most desire do not happen; or, if they do, it is neither in the time nor in the circumstances when they would have given us extreme pleasure.

Not everything comes together in the best way ever every day. It just doesn't.

It’s like in soccer: you have to deal with the penalties where they fall; you can’t choose where they’re going to land. Life is like that, and you have to deal with it even if you don’t like it.