Anne Lamott Quotes

This life is messy.

Life itself, she thought, as she went upstairs to dress for dinner, was stranger than dreams and far, far more disordered.

The world does not have tidy endings. The world does not have neat connections. It is not filled with epiphanies that work perfectly at the moment that you need them.

I'm of the opinion that life doesn't always tie up neatly at the end of the episode.

Nobody's life is wrapped up neatly in a bow.

I don't ever want to tie a song in a little bow. Life doesn't work that way, and war doesn't ever work that way.

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

. . . the messiness of experience, that may be what we mean by life.

Life doesn't tend to fix things or wrap them up in bows.

Besides being complicated, reality, in my experience, is usually odd. It is not neat, not obvious, not what you expect.

You can't predict anything. How can you be certain about anything when everything is chaos and we're not in control?

Fluidity and discontinuity are central to the reality in which we live.

What we imagine is order is merely the prevailing form of chaos.

Life isn't like a book. Life isn't logical or sensible or orderly. Life is a mess most of the time. And theology must be lived in the midst of that mess.

History seems to be so clumsy.

The thing about democracy, beloveds, is that it is not neat, orderly, or quiet. It requires a certain relish for confusion.

Zippy accepts chaos as what it is, which is the real order of everything.

Chaos is a friend of mine.

Chaos is the score upon which reality is written.

Grace is thickly counter-intuitive. It feels risky and unfair. It's dangerous and disorderly. It wrestles control out of our hands. It is wild and unsettling. It turns everything that makes sense to us upside-down and inside-out.

Stability is not the way of the world.

Life is not orderly. No matter how we try to make life so, right in the middle of it we die, lose a leg, fall in love, drop a jar of applesauce.

The world is noisy and messy. You need to deal with the noise and uncertainty.

There is nothing stable in the world; uproar's your only music.

The world is a dynamic mess of jiggling things.