Quotes from Anne Lamott

If courage is not there, if the possibility of things getting better is not there, listen a little harder.

Being human can be so dispiriting. It is a real stretch for me a lot of the time.

Mercy is radical kindness. Mercy means offering or being offered aid in desperate straits. Mercy is not deserved. It involves absolving the unabsolvable, forgiving the unforgivable. Mercy brings us to the miracle of apology, given and accepted, to unashamed humility when we have erred or forgotten.

Then it came to me: I was asking the wrong question. The right one is: Where is God in gang warfare? And the answer is, The same place God is in Darfur, and in our alcoholism, and when children are bullied: being crucified.

Forgiveness, I know now, is maturity. Mercy is maturity. It's slow release, like certain medicines. It's incremental, like traveling along the spiral chambers of a nautilus.

I do believe that God is with us even when we're at our craziest and that this goodness guides, provides, and protects.

For thirty years, she has answered all of my distressed or deeply annoyed phone calls by saying, "Hello, Dearest. I'm so glad it's you!" I've come to believe that this is how God feels when I pray, even at my least attractive.

This family business can be so stressful - difficult, damaged people showing up t spend time with other difficult, damanged people

What a paradox: that we connect with God, with divinity, in our flesh and blood and time and space. We connect with God in our humanity. A great truth, attributed to Emily Dickinson, is that "hope inspires the good to reveal itself." This is almost all I ever need to remember. Gravity and sadness yank us down, and hope gives us a nudge to help one another get back up or to sit with the fallen on the ground, in the abyss, in solidarity.

You lose the known package of your nice organized self almost instantly here. Overeating is one way back, the way it is at funerals at home.

One rarely knows where to begin the search for meaning, though by necessity, we can only start where we are.

Taking kids outside to love God and nature is just about the most Jesus-y thing we can do. Jesus was nearly always outside with his disciples, or alone with the stars. To take kids to a beach, even one that is littered, it to bring them to an altar (a big one) surrounded by the blue-grey ocean billowing outward like a skirt, flecked with sunlight, like foil or diamonds.