Risa > Risa's Quotes

“New Yorkers think they’ve seen it all, heard it all, and know it all. But I learned from watching The Hour of Power—a Sunday-morning religious TV show—that being hard to shock was not the same thing as being tolerant.”
― Jo Maeder, When I Married My Mother:A Daughter's Search for What Really Matters--and How She Found It Caring for Mama Jo

“I learned something about grief. I had heard people say that when someone dies, it leaves a hole in the world. But it doesn’t, I realized. Arturo was still everywhere. Something would happen and I would think, Wait until I tell Arturo. I kept turning around, expecting to”
― Anonymous

“see him. If he had disappeared completely, I thought, it might be easier. If I had no knowledge that he had ever existed, no evidence that he was ever a part of our lives, it might have been bearable. And how wrong that sounded: part of our lives. As if he was something with boundaries, something that hadn’t permeated us, ɻowed through us and in us and all around us. I learned something about grief. When someone dies, it doesn’t leave a hole, and that’s the agony.”
― Anonymous

“thousands of miles apart from now on and we would go on with our lives and get older and change and grow, but we would never have to look for each other. Inside each of us, I was pretty sure, was a place for the other. Nothing that had happened and nothing that would ever happen would make that less true”
― Anonymous

“It was like she had said—ɹnding is for things that are lost. We would be”
― Anonymous

“awake as if for the first time, and you are standing in a part of the town where the air is sweet—your face flushed, your chest thumping, your stomach a planet, your heart a planet, your every organ a separate planet, all of it of a piece though the pieces turn separately, O silent indications of the inevitable, as among the natural restraints of winter and good sense, life blows you apart in her arms”
― Anonymous

“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.

When nothing new can get in, that's death. When oxygen can't find a way in, you die. But new is scary, and new can be disappointing, and confusing - we had this all figured out, and now we don't.

New is life.”
― Anne Lamott, Help Thanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayers

“I was usually filled with a sense of something like shame until I'd remember that wonderful line of Blake's- that we are here to learn to endure the beams of love- and I would take a long deep breath and force these words out of my strangulated throat: "Thank you.”
― Anne Lamott

“And as it turns out, if one person is praying for you, buckle up. Things can happen.”
― Anne Lamott, Help Thanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayers

“When you make friends with fear, it can’t rule you.”
― Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith

“I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won't have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that alot of people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they're doing it.”
― Anne Lamott

“I pray not to be such a whiny, self-obsessed baby, and give thanks that I am not quite as bad as I used to be (talk about miracles). Then something comes up, and I overreact and blame and sulk, and it feels like I haven't made any progress at all. But it turns out I'm less of a brat than before, and I hit the reset button much sooner, shake it off, and get my sense if humor back.”
― Anne Lamott, Help Thanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayers

“You have to make mistakes to find out who you aren't. You take the action, and the insight follows: You don't think your way into becoming yourself.”
― Anne Lamott

“... everyone has come to understand that unconditional love is a reality, but with as shelf life of about eight to ten seconds. [p. 110]”
― Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

“You will go through your life thinking there was a day in second grade that you must have missed, when the grown-ups came in and explained, everything important to other kids. they said, 'Look, you're human, you're going to feel isolated and afraid a lot of the time, nad have bad self-esteem, and feel uniquely ruined, but here is the magic phrase that will take this feeling away. It will be like a feather that will lift you out of that fear and self-consciousness every single time, all through your life.' And then they told the cildren who were there that day the magic phrase that everyone else in the world knows about and uses when feeling blue, which only you don't know, because you were home sick the day the grown-ups told the children the way the whole world works.
But there was not such a day in school. No one got the instructions. That is the secret of life. Everyone is flailing around, winging it most of the time, trying to find the way out, or through, or up, without a map. This lack of instruction manual is how most people develop compassion, and how they figure out to show up, care, help and serve, as the only way of filling up and being free. Otherwise you gorw up to be someone who needs to dominate and shame others so no one will know that you weren't there the day the instructions were passed out.”
― Anne Lamott

“What saved me was that I found gentle, loyal and hilarious companions, which is at the heart of meaning: maybe we don’t find a lot of answers to life’s tougher questions, but if we find a few true friends, that’s even better. They help you see who you truly are, which is not always the loveliest possible version of yourself, but then comes the greatest miracle of all—they still love you. They keep you company as perhaps you become less of a whiny baby, if you accept their help.”
― Anne Lamott, Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair

“A hundred years from now?
All new people.”
― Anne Lamott

“Most people's intuitions are drowned out by folk sayings. We have a moment of real feeling or insight, and then we come up with a folk saying that captures the insight in a kind of wash. The intuition may be real and ripe, fresh with possibilities, but the folk saying is guaranteed to be a cliche, stale and self-contained.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“having nothing to struggle
against
they have nothing to struggle
for.”
― Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense