Anne Lamott - Traveling Mercies (1999)

48 Sourced Quotes

View all Anne Lamott Quotes
Only grieving can heal grief; the passage of time will lessen the acuteness, but time alone, without the direct experience of grief, will not heal it.

Anne Lamott
Needless to say, there was no one around remotely fitting the description of a normal person: I was at a writing conference.

Anne Lamott
And she is going to dance, dance hungry, dance full, dance each cold astonishing moment, now when she is young and again when she is old.

Anne Lamott
Grace is having a commitment to- or at least an acceptance of- being ineffective and foolish. That our bottled charm is the main roadblock to drinking that clear cool glass of love.

Anne Lamott
The depth of the feeling continued to surprise and threaten me, but each time it hit again and I bore it...I would discover that it hadn't washed me away.

Anne Lamott
Most of the time, all you have is the moment, and the imperfect love of the people around you.

Anne Lamott
Looking back on the God my friend believed in, he seems a little erratic, not entirely unlike her father — God as borderline personality.

Anne Lamott
Without using the word, everyone started forgiving each other again. Just like that, from the no of all nothingness: you have a big tense mess and out of it comes some joy. It must be magic.

Anne Lamott
Who was it who said that forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a different past?

Anne Lamott
But it was the singing that pulled me in and split me wide open.

Anne Lamott
I kept asking God for help, and after a while I realized something — that Josh was not enjoying this either. He was just trying to take care of himself, and I made the radical decision to let him off the hook.

Anne Lamott
This is the most profound spiritual truth I know: that even when we're most sure that love can't conquer all, it seems to anyway. It goes down into the rat hole with us, in the guise of our friends, and there it swells and comforts. It gives us second winds, third winds, hundredth winds.

Anne Lamott
It's funny: I always imagined when I was a kid that adults had some kind of inner toolbox full of shiny tools: the saw of discernment, the hammer of wisdom, the sandpaper of patience. But then when I grew up I found that life handed you these rusty bent old tools - friendships, prayer, conscience, honesty - and said 'do the best you can with these, they will have to do'. And mostly, against all odds, they do.

Anne Lamott
The road to enlightenment is long and difficult, and you should try not to forget snacks and magazines.

Anne Lamott
Then the singing enveloped me. It was furry and resonant, coming from everyone's very heart. There was no sense of performance or judgment, only that the music was breath and food.

Anne Lamott
The last song was so deep and raw and pure that I could not escape. It was as if the people were singing in between the notes, weeping and joyful at the same time, and I felt like their voices or something was rocking me in its bosom, holding me like a scared kid, and I opened up to that feeling-and it washed over me.

Anne Lamott
And my fear of failure has been lifelong and deep. If you are what you do- and I think my parents may have accidentally given me this idea- and you do poorly, what then? It's over; you're wiped out. All those prophecies you heard in the dark have come true, and people can see the real you, see what a schmendrick you are, what a fraud.

Anne Lamott
I went to church with my grandparents sometimes and I loved it.

Anne Lamott