Here is the best true story on giving I know, and it was told by Jack Kornfield of the Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre. An eight-year-old boy had a younger sister who was dying of leukemia,...
Her message was always the same: God loved the world, all evidence to the contrary, and we must not give up on God.
Help for the sick and hungry,home for the homeless folk, peace in the world forever,this is my prayer, O Lord. Amen.
First I showered off that horrible butt smell you get from being on an airplane. [p. 257]
Don't look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.
Don't be mean to yourself, though . . .this is the only sin.
Children should not have treacherous diseases or be afraid. This should be one rule we all agree on.
But what if the great secret insider-trading truth is that you don't ever get over the biggest losses in your life? Is that good news, bad news, or both? . . . . The pain does grow less acute, but the...
But in surrender you have won.
But grace can be the experience of a second wind, when even though what you want is clarity and resolution, what you get is stamina and poignancy and the strength to hang on.
Books! To fling myself into a book, to be carried away to another world while being at my most grounded, on my butt or in my bed or favorite chair is literally how I have survived being here at all.
Being a writer guarantees that you will spend too much time alone -- and that as a result, your mind will begin to warp.
Because for some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, world...
Astonishing material and revelation appear in our lives all the time. Let it be. Unto us, so much is given. We just have to be open for business.
Anne Lamott’s priest friend Tom, how to get through:
All that is holding us together [is] stories and compassion.
After a while the middle-aged person who lives in her head begins to talk to her soul, the kid.
One of the worst things about being a parent, for me, is the self-discovery, the being face to face with one's secret insanity and brokenness and rage.
I naively believe that self-love is 80 percent of the solution, that it helps beyond words to take yourself through the day as you would with your most beloved mental-patient relative, with great humo...
You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.