Rediscovering Mercy, Hallelujah Anyway, Anne Lamott, quotes

"When we manage a flash of mercy for someone we don’t like, 
especially a truly awful person, including ourselves, 
we experience a great spiritual moment, a new point of view that can make us gasp.
It gives us the chance to rediscover something both old and original, 
the sweet child in us who, all evidence to the contrary, was not killed off, 
but just put in the drawer. 
I realize now how desperately, how grievously, I have needed the necessary mercy to experience self-respect. 
It is what a lot of us were so frantic for all along, and we never knew it. 
We’ve tried almost suicidally for our whole lives to shake it from the boughs of the material world’s trees. 
But it comes from within, from love, from the flow of the universe; from inside the cluttered drawer."

Rediscovering Mercy

Stitches, Anne Lamott, quotes

"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."
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"Alone, we are doomed, but by the same token, we’ve learned that people are impossible, even the ones we love most — especially the ones we love most: they’re damaged, prickly and set in their ways. Also, they’ve gotten old and a little funny, which can be draining. It is most comfortable to be invisible, to observe life from a distance, at one with our own intoxicating superior thoughts. But comfort and isolation are not where the surprises are. They are not where hope is… Only together do we somehow keep coming through unsurvivable loss, the stress of never knowing how things will shake down, to the biggest miracle of all, that against all odds, we come through the end of the world, again and again — changed but intact (more or less)… Insofar as I have any idea of “the truth,” I believe this to be as true as gravity and grace."
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"The world is always going to be dangerous, and people get badly banged up, but how can there be more meaning than helping one another stand up in a wind and stay warm?"

Stitches, Anne Lamott