GOOD COMMUNICATION

'She heard a quiet sniffle of laughter and a moment's silence, the way Lank held space for you in case you wanted to continue, without crowding the words that might need a minute to form.' 

Anne Lamott, Imperfect Birds, p.156. 

GROWING UP

'Finally I thought of one true thing, which is that sometimes I act just as juvenile as I ever did, but as I get older, I do it for shorter periods of time. I find my way back to the path sooner...' 

Anne Lamott, Grace (Eventually), p.251. 

HAVING CHILDREN

'When we have children, we know that they will need us, and maybe love us, but we don't have a clue how hard it is going to be. We also can't understand when we are pregnant, or when our relatives are expecting, how profound and dicey it is to have a a shared history with a child, shared blood, shared genes, even humor...you wait and see what what will come of it, and with people, that almost always means a mess.' 

Anne Lamott, Grace (Eventually), p.89. 

THE DEVIL

'...an old man at church once told me never to give the devil a ride. Because if he likes the ride, pretty soon he'll want to drive.' 

Anne Lamott, Grace (Eventually), p.51. 

LIFE

'I will never know hard hard it is to be developmentally disabled, but 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 our present our defects and screw-ups in either more charming or more intimidating ways.' 

Anne Lamott, Grace (Eventually), p.42. 

WHEN LIFE HURTS

'What can you say when people call with a scary or heart-breaking prognosis? You can say that we don't have to live alone with our worries and losses, that all the people in their tide pool will be there for them. You say that it totally sucks, and that grace abounds.' 

Anne Lamott, Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith, p.25. 

THE TRINITY

'I didn't need to understand the hypostatic unity of the Trinity; I just needed to turn my life to whoever came up with redwood trees.'

Anne Lamott, Plan B, p.295.

BEING AN UNCLE

'...he performed the two most important functions for an uncle - made farting sounds to amuse her, and took care that he didn't get her fingers caught in any drawers.'

Anne Lamott, Plan B, p.261.

GOD'S GRACE

'This drives me crazy, that God seems to have no taste, and no standards. Yet on most days, this is what gives some of us hope.'

Anne Lamott, Plan B, p.222.

FRIENDSHIP

'Rubble is the ground on which our deepest friendships are built.'
Anne Lamott, Plan B, p.174.

CHURCH

'...time, and showing up, turns most messes to compost, and something surprising may grow, and I have noticed this especially at my church.'

Anne Lamott, Plan B, p.77.

GRACE

'Grace means you're in a different universe from where you had been stuck, when you had absolutely no way to get there on your own.'

Anne Lamott, Plan B, p.55.

GOD

'When God is going to do something wonderful, He...always starts with a hardship; when God is going to do something amazing, He...starts with an impossibility.'

Anne Lamott, Plan B, p.34.

GOD

'You've got to love this in God - consistently assemblying the motleyist people to bring, into the lonely and frightening world, a commitment to caring and community. It's a centuries-long reality show - Moses the stutterer, Rahab the hooker, David the adulterer, Mary the homeless teenager. Not to mention all the mealy-mouthed disciples. Not to mention a raging insecure narcissist like me.'

Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith, p.22.

COURAGE

'...courage is fear that has said its prayers...'

Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies, p.239.

FORGIVENESS

'...families are definitely the training ground for forgiveness. At some point you pardon the people in your family for being stuck together in all their weirdness, and when you can do that, you can learn to pardon anyone. Even yourself, eventually. It's like learning to drive on an old car with a tricky transmission: if you can master shifting gears on that, you can learn to drive anything.'

Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies, p.220.

PASTORAL CARE

'...I believe that when all is said and done, all you can do is to show up for someone in a crisis, which seems so inadequate. But then when you do, it can radically change everything. Your there-ness, your stepping into a scared parent's line of vision, can be life giving, because often everyone else is hiding - especially, in the beginning, the parents. So you come to keep them company when it feels like the whole world is falling apart, and your being there says that just for this moment, this one tiny piece of the world is OK, or is at least better.'

Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies, p.164.

BUSYNESS

'I started to feel like a tired, wired little kid at a birthday party who has had way too much sugar, who is in all ways on overload, but still finds herself blindfolded and spun around for a game of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, and then pushed more or less in the direction of the wall with the donkey on it. But I was so turned around, so lost and overwhelmed and stressed that I couldn't even remember where the wall with the donkey was - or even in what direction it might be found. So I couldn't take one step forward without there being a chance that I was actually walking further away from it. And it took me a while to remember that for me, the wall with the donkey on it is Jesus.'

Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies, p.149.

GRACE

'I do not at all understand the mystery of grace - only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us. It can be received gladly or grudgingly, in big gulps or in tiny tastes, like a deer at the salt. I gobbled it, licked it, held it down between my little hooves.'  

GRACE

'...grace is having a commitment to - or at least an acceptance of - being ineffective and foolish.'

Anne Lammot, Traveling Mercies, p.142.