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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| ed7a2db | You cannot avoid hearing drums in Haiti. | travel | Zora Neale Hurston | |
| 0fe9396 | And twelve more white men had stopped whatever they were doing to listen and pass on what happened between Janie and Tea Cake Woods, and as to whether things were done right or not. That was funny too. Twelve strange men who didn't know a thing about people like Tea Cake and her were going to sit on the thing. Eight or ten white women had come to look at her too. They wore good clothes and had the pinky color that comes of good food. They w.. | Zora Neale Hurston | ||
| 75d8e36 | But the inescapable fact that stuck in my craw, was: my people had sold me and the white people had bought me. . . . It impressed upon me the universal nature of greed and glory. --Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road | Zora Neale Hurston | ||
| fdb619f | I read more than other kids; I luxuriated in books. Books were my refuge. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 5db0245 | they got to be so conceited because they were Catholics. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 14e2717 | Nothing is as important as a likable narrator. Nothing holds a story together better. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 79df40a | If we stay where we are, where we're stuck, where we're comfortable and safe, we die there. We become like mushrooms, living in the dark, with poop up to our chins. If you want to know only what you already know, you're dying. | Anne Lamott | ||
| bc78141 | Amen" is how most of us end our prayers, the standard response to prayers in the synagogue and the church and the mosque. The word means "And so it is" or "Truly." Well, that's very nice, but what on earth does "it" mean? What is? The people praying are the ones saying "Amen," so it's not God saying bossily, like Judge Judy, "So it is. All done. Go away. Get some help with that anger." It is us, the damaged, hopeless people, lifting up our .. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 15d59c5 | She quoted the Reverend James Forbes as saying, "Nobody gets into heaven without a letter of reference from the poor." | Anne Lamott | ||
| 126c7d7 | But where do we even start on the daily walk of restoration and awakening? We start where we are. We find God in our human lives, and that includes the suffering. I get thirsty people glasses of water, even if that thirsty person is just me. | Anne Lamott | ||
| f477905 | The search for meaning will fill you with a sense of meaning. Otherwise | Anne Lamott | ||
| 4e7c2c1 | Easter is so profound. Christmas was an afterthought in the early Church, the birth not observed for a couple hundred years. But no one could help noticing the resurrection: Rumi said that spring was Christ, "martyred plants rising up from their shrouds." Easter says that love is more powerful than death, bigger than the dark, bigger than cancer, bigger even than airport security lines." | Anne Lamott | ||
| bcc8516 | ultimately we're all just walking each other home. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 4a2ab2c | It made no sense that Abraham could head for the mountain in Moriah still believing in God's goodness. It made no sense that even as he walked his son to the sacrificial altar, he still believed God's promise that Isaac would give him many descendants. It made no sense that he was willing to do the one thing in the world he could not do, just because God told him to. God told him to obey and to believe that he as a loving god and could be t.. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 1ea37ad | First I showered off that horrible butt smell you get from being on an airplane. [p. 257] | Anne Lamott | ||
| 242af18 | Remember the scene in Cat Ballou where a very drunk Lee Marvin goes from unconscious to ranting to triumphant to roaring to weeping defeat, and then finally passes out? One of the men watching him says, with real awe, "I never seen a man get through a day so fast." Don't let this be you." | Anne Lamott | ||
| 99075aa | Don't be mean to yourself, though . . .this is the only sin. | Anne Lamott | ||
| cd40155 | But baseball, if we love it, gives us back our place in the crowd. It restores us. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 6efe495 | Mark Twain said that Adam was the only man who, when he said a good thing, knew that nobody had said it before. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 90f33f9 | But in surrender you have won. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 24df153 | Rosie had to keep her room neat enough so James would not freak out, but not so neat that they could figure it all out, break the code, of who you truly were, what you were up to, your values, your truest parts. ... you were layer upon layer of ideas and erasures and new ideas and soul and images. [p. 68] | Anne Lamott | ||
| 833140c | She slept deeply, but as usual, she did not dream. It had been months; none of them was dreaming anymore. [p. 227] | Anne Lamott | ||
| 211152f | Bonnie persuaded me to focus on the good, just for today: tomorrow I can call back and we will wallow in the total awfulness of Amy's behavior, which will surely lead to permanent estrangement and dead bodies. Just for today, I was supposed to try to remember three things: The baby is not falling off the earth, or headed to Afghanistan. So many things are going well: Everyone has good health. Jax is perfect. Even though I have acid and sewa.. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 6532542 | Now, Muriel Spark is said to have felt that she was taking dictation from God every morning-- sitting there, one supposes, plugged into a Dictaphone, typing away, humming. But this is a very hostile and aggressive position. One might hope for bad things to rain down on a person like this. | Anne Lamott | ||
| a62f8a6 | 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. | Anne Lamott | ||
| b8ff781 | If we stay where we are, where we're stuck, where we're comfortable and safe, we die there. We become like mushrooms, living in the dark, with poop up to our chins. If you want to know only what you already know, you're dying. You're saying: Leave me alone; I don't mind this little rathole. It's warm and dry. Really, it's fine. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 19957cc | those years I fell for the great palace lie that grief should be gotten over as quickly and as privately as possible. But what I've discovered since is that the lifelong fear of grief keeps us in a barren, isolated place and that 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 | Anne Lamott | ||
| dba5b0a | I'm pretty sure that only by experiencing that ocean of sadness in a naked and immediate way do we come to be healed--which is to say, we come to experience life with a real sense of presence and spaciousness and peace. | Anne Lamott | ||
| df98de1 | Late Fragment And did you get what you wanted from this life even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth. RAYMOND CARVER | Anne Lamott | ||
| 263138d | When Sam was six or so, he explained to me why we call God "God": "Because when you see something so great, you just go, 'God!" -- | Anne Lamott | ||
| 41a2a4e | The trees are so huge that they shut you up. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 8ea4825 | When I asked Father Tom where we find God in this present darkness, he said that God is in creation, and to get outdoors as much as you can. | darkness god outdoors | Anne Lamott | |
| 42a578b | I read a wonderful passage in an interview with Carolyn Chute, the author of The Beans of Egypt, Maine, who was discussing rewriting: "I feel like a lot of time my writing is like having about twenty boxes of Christmas decorations. But no tree. You're going, Where do I put this? Then they go, Okay, you can have a tree, but we'll blindfold you and you gotta cut it down with a spoon." This is how I've arrived at my plots a number of times. I .. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 63b842b | When you are on the knife's edge--when nobody knows exactly what is going to happen next, only that it will be worse--you take in today. | Anne Lamott | ||
| ca17bbf | We kept on cooking and walking the dog, taking the kids to the park, cleaning the kitchen, and letting Sara and Adam hate what was going on when they needed to. Sometimes we let them resist finding any meaning or solace in anything that had to do with their daughter's diagnosis, and this was one of the hardest things to do -- to stop trying to make things come out better than they were. We let them spew when they needed to; we offered the g.. | grief | Anne Lamott | |
| 4ba1abe | Plot grows out of character. If you focus on who the people in your story are, if you sit and write about two people you know and are getting to know better day by day, something is bound to happen. Characters should not, conversely, serve as pawns for some plot you've dreamed up. Any plot you impose on your characters will be onomatopoetic: PLOT. | Anne Lamott | ||
| bba7a3c | The whole game in the fifties and early sixties was for no one to know who you really were. We children were witness to the total pretense of how our parents wanted the world to see them. We helped them maintain this image, because if anyone outside the family could see who they really were deep down, the whole system, the ship of your family, might sink. We held our breath to give the ship buoyancy. We were little air tanks. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 156bc9b | The redwoods are like organ pipes, playing silent chords. | Anne Lamott | ||
| ef98f25 | And because she did not shove this down my throat, this dawned on me. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 8926694 | it may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 3a904fd | There's freedom in hitting bottom | Anne Lamott | ||
| 4ad2a2d | Also, I have a pouch below my belly, whereas I'd always had a thin waist before. Now there's this situation down there, low and grabbable. If it had a zipper, you could store stuff in there, like a fanny pack. | Anne Lamott | ||
| 4efb82f | in order to be a writer, you have to learn to be reverent. | Anne Lamott | ||
| b3676d2 | Gratitude begins in our hearts and then dovetails into behavior. It almost always makes you willing to be of service, which is where the joy resides. It means you are willing to stop being such a jerk. When you are aware of all that has been given to you, in your lifetime and in the past few days, it is hard not to be humbled, and pleased to give back. Most | Anne Lamott |