Anne Lamott - Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith (2007)

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I remember staring at my son endlessly when he was an infant, stunned by his very existence, wondering where on earth he had come from.

Anne Lamott
My best teachers were mess, failure, death, mistakes, and the people I hated, including myself.

Anne Lamott
This business of having been issued a body is deeply confusing... Bodies are so messy and disappointing.

Anne Lamott
Every time I see the bumper sticker that says We think we're humans having spiritual experiences, but we're really spirits having human experiences, I (a) think it's true and (b) want to ram the car.

Anne Lamott
All I ever wanted since I arrived here on Earth were the things that turned out to be within reach. The same things I needed as a baby - to go from cold to warm, lonely to held, the vessel to the giver, empty to full. You can change the world with a hot bath, if you sink into it from a place of knowing that you are worth profound care, even when you're dirty and rattled. Who knew?

Anne Lamott
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
I seem to hang on to my hates because they help take my mind off the cracked reflection in the mirror.

Anne Lamott
When I was young, I used to be so jealous of other girls that it crippled me.

Anne Lamott
Sometimes I think that Jesus watches my neurotic struggles, and shakes his head and grips his forehead and starts tossing back mojitos.

Anne Lamott
Even though you get the monkey off your back, the circus never really leaves town.

Anne Lamott
My mother has been dead for several years. But old mothers never die, and they never fade away. They are too complicated for either.

Anne Lamott
Sometimes grace works like water wings when you feel you are sinking.

Anne Lamott
Sometimes grace is a ribbon of mountain air that gets in through the cracks.

Anne Lamott
Lies cannot nourish or protect you. Only freedom from fear, freedom from lies, can make us beautiful, and keep us safe.

Anne Lamott
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
She floated away on the riptide of dementia, ultimately a speck on the horizon, waving for as long as she could to her deeply confused children onshore.

Anne Lamott
Old age on a good day is a dance we don't know the steps to: we falter. We may not be going in the direction we'd anticipated, or have any clue at all about which way to turn next.

Anne Lamott
He got me a cup of tea with honey, toast with honey, yogurt with honey, like I was John the Baptist with the flu.

Anne Lamott
It is hard to remember that you are a cherished spiritual being when you're burping up apple fritters and Cheetos.

Anne Lamott
We turn toward love like sunflowers to the sun, and then the human parts kick in. This seems to me the only real problem, the human parts—the body, for instance, and the mind.

Anne Lamott
For too long, and despite what people told me, I had fallen for what the culture said about beauty, youth, features, heights, weights, hair textures, upper arms.

Anne Lamott
If you have a body, you are entitled to the full range of feelings. It comes with the package.

Anne Lamott
I do know the sorrow of being ordinary, and that much of our life is spent doing the crazy mental arithmetic of how, at any given moment, we might improve, or at least disguise or present our defects and screw-ups in either more charming or more intimidating ways.

Anne Lamott
Grace arrived, like the big, loopy stitches with which a grandmotherly stranger might baste your hem temporarily.

Anne Lamott
It really IS easier to experience spiritual connection when your life is in the process of coming apart.

Anne Lamott
As a Christian and a feminist, the most important message I can carry and fight for is the sacredness of each human life, and reproductive rights for all women are a crucial part of that. It is a moral necessity that we not be forced to bring children into the world for whom we cannot be responsible and adoring and present. We must not inflict life on children who will be resented; we must not inflict unwanted children on society.

Anne Lamott
You can get the monkey off your back, but the circus never leaves town.

Anne Lamott