Anne Lamott Quotes About Mothers

Quotes about: Mothers

• Intelligence, goodness, humanity, excitement, serenity. Over time, these are the things that change the musculature of your face, as do laughter, and animation, and especially whatever peace you can broker with the person inside. It's furrow, pinch, and judgement that make us look older - our mothers were right. They said that if you made certain faces, they would stick, and they do. But our mothers forgot that faces of kindness and integrity stick as well.

  Anne Lamott

  Mother, Laughter, Kindness

  "Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith". Book by Anne Lamott, 2007.

• Most of me was glad when my mother died. She was a handful, but not in a cute, festive way. More in a life-threatening way, that had caused me a long time ago to give up all hope of ever feeling good about having had her as a mother.

  Anne Lamott

  Cute, Mother, Giving Up

• I did not raise my son, Sam, to celebrate Mother's Day. I didn't want him to feel some obligation to buy me pricey lunches or flowers, some annual display of gratitude that you have to grit your teeth and endure.

  Anne Lamott

  Mother, Gratitude, Flower

• And we've read scary books and watched scary movies and TV shows together. He's met monsters, ghouls, and demons on the page and on the screen. There's nothing like watching Anaconda with your best friend or lying in bed next to your mother reading Roald Dahl, because that way you get to explore dark stuff safely. You get to laugh with it, to step out on the vampire's dance floor and take him for a spin, and then step back into your life. When you make friends with fear, it can't rule you.

  Anne Lamott

  Mother, Fear, Lying

  Anne Lamott (2000). “Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith”, Anchor

• [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

  Mother, Minorities, Taught

  Anne Lamott (2000). “Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith”, Anchor

• I’m probably just as good a mother as the next repressed, obsessive-compulsive paranoiac.

  Anne Lamott

  Mother, Obsessive Compulsive, Next

  Anne Lamott (1994). “Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year”, Fawcett

• Now. Maybe you think it is arrogant or self centered, or ridiculous for me to believe that God bothered to wiggle a cheap bolt out of my new used car because he or she needed to keep me away for a few days until just the moment when my old friend most needed me to help her mother move into whatever comes next. Maybe nothing conscious helped to stall me so that I would be there when I could be most useful. Or maybe it did. I’ll never know for sure. And anyway, it doesn’t really matter.

  Anne Lamott

  Mother, Believe, Moving

  Anne Lamott (2000). “Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith”, p.102, Anchor

• 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

  Mother, Running, Eye

  Anne Lamott (2000). “Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith”, p.204, Anchor

• 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

  Mother, Smell, Giving

• I was the angriest daughter on earth, and also, one of the most devoted.

  Anne Lamott

  Daughter, Mother, Earth

  Anne Lamott (2006). “Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith”, p.232, Penguin

• No one is more sentimentalized in America than mothers on Mother's Day, but no one is more often blamed for the culture's bad people and behavior.

  Anne Lamott

  Inspiring, Mothers Day, America

• Bananas are great, as I believe them to be the only known cure for existential dread. Also, Mother Teresa said that in India, a woman dying in the street will share her banana with anyone who needs it, whereas in America, people amass and hoard as many bananas as they can to sell for an exorbitant profit. So half of them go bad, anyway.

  Anne Lamott

  Mother, Believe, America

• 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

  Inspiring, Mothers Day, Gay

• I don't write about the intimate details of my cousins and aunts and uncles, and my mother and my father because it's not right to, for me.

  Anne Lamott

  Mother, Cousin, Uncles

  Interview with Austin Allen, bigthink.com. April 6, 2010.

• Every woman's path is difficult, and many mothers were as equipped to raise children as wire monkey mothers. I say that without judgment: It is, sadly, true. An unhealthy mother's love is withering.

  Anne Lamott

  Mother, Children, Love Is

• Having a child as a single mother was a crucible - maybe this is true for all parents. I got rid of so much stuff that didn't really matter in the scheme of things-like throwing stuff out of an airplane that kept me flying too low. What was left was essential, i.e. not a lot of extraneous stuff that had kept me busy and people-pleasing. I just didn't have the luxury of wasting my life force on so much stupidity and distraction. That made me strong.

  Anne Lamott

  Mother, Strong, Children

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• I didn't write about my mother much in the third year after she died. I was still trying to get my argument straight: When her friends or our relatives wondered why I was still so hard on her, I could really lay out the case for what it had been like to be raised by someone who had loathed herself, her husband, even her own name.

  Anne Lamott

  Mother, Husband, Writing

• 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

  Mother, Strong, Perspective

• I spent my whole life helping my mother carry around her psychic trunks like a bitter bellhop. So a great load was lifted when she died, and my life was much easier.

  Anne Lamott

  Mother, Psychics, Helping

• My mother was a not-too-devoted atheist. She went to Episcopal church on Christmas Eve every year, and that was mostly it.

  Anne Lamott

  Mother, Atheist, Years

• Mothering has been the richest experience of my life, but I am still opposed to Mother's Day. It perpetuates the dangerous idea that all parents are somehow superior to non-parents.

  Anne Lamott

  Mother, Dangerous Ideas, Parent

• 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

  Mother, Hands, People

• My mother's eyes were large and brown, like my son's, but unlike Sam's, they were always frantic, like a hummingbird who can't quite find the flower but keeps jabbing around.

  Anne Lamott

  Mother, Flower, Eye

• You want to give me chocolate and flowers? That would be great. I love them both. I just don't want them out of guilt, and I don't want them if you're not going to give them to all the people who helped mother our children.

  Anne Lamott

  Mother, Children, Flower

• I know that if I feel any deprivation or fear [about money], the solution is to give. The solution is to go find some mothers on the streets of San Raphael and give them tens and twenties and mail off another $50 to Doctors Without Borders to use for the refugees in Kosovo. Because I know that giving is the way we can feel abundant. Giving is the way that we fill ourselves up.... For me the way to fill up is through service and sharing and getting myself to give more than I feel comfortable giving.

  Anne Lamott

  Mother, Doctors, Giving

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