Small Victories Quotes

“it speaks of such integrity to refuse to pretend that you’re doing well just to help other people deal with the fact that sometimes we face an impossible loss.”
― Anne Lamott, Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace

“I was learning the secrets of life: that you could become the woman you’d dared to dream of being, but to do so you were going to have to fall in love with your own crazy, ruined self.”
― Anne Lamott, Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace

“I love Wendell Berry’s lines that “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, Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace

“Getting found almost always means being lost for a while.”
― Anne Lamott, Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace

“Addicts and alcoholics will tell you that their recovery began when they woke up in pitiful and degraded enough shape to take Step Zero, which is: “This shit has got to stop.”
― Anne Lamott, Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace

“Growing up is not going nearly as efficiently as I had hoped.”
― Anne Lamott, Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace

“Forgiveness means it finally becomes unimportant for you to hit back. You’re done. It doesn’t necessarily mean you want to vacation together.”
― Anne Lamott, Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace

“You have to be grateful whenever you get to someplace safe and okay, even if it turns out it wasn’t quite where you were heading.”
― Anne Lamott, Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace

“Jesus was soft on crime. He’d never have been elected anything.”
― Anne Lamott, Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace

“Easter says that love is more powerful than death, bigger than the dark, bigger than cancer, bigger even than airport security lines.”
― Anne Lamott, Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace

“Trappings and charm wear off, I’ve learned. The book of welcome says, Let people see you. They see that your upper arms are beautiful, soft and clean and warm, and then they will see this about their own, some of the time. It’s called having friends, choosing each other, getting found, being fished out of the rubble. It blows you away, how this wonderful event happened—me in your life, you in mine. Two parts fit together. This hadn’t occurred all that often, but now that it does, it’s the wildest experience. It could almost make a believer out of you. Of course, life will randomly go to hell every so often, too. Cold winds arrive and prick you; the rain falls down your neck; darkness comes. But now there are two of you. Holy Moly.”
― Anne Lamott, Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace

“What seems true is that something in life, on the highways or in our hearts, is always being installed, or being repaired, or being torn down for the next installation.”
― Anne Lamott, Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace

“Rumi: “Where there is ruin, there is hope for a treasure.”
― Anne Lamott, Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace

“Into every life crap will fall. Most of us do as well as possible, and some of it works okay, and we try to release that which doesn’t and which is never going to.”
― Anne Lamott, Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace

“The welcome book would have taught us that power and signs of status can’t save us, that welcome—both offering and receiving—is our source of safety. Various chapters and verses of this book would remind us that we are wanted and even occasionally delighted in, despite the unfortunate truth that we are greedy-grabby, self-referential, indulgent, overly judgmental, and often hysterical. Somehow that book “went missing.” Or when the editorial board of bishops pored over the canonical lists from Jerusalem and Alexandria, they arbitrarily nixed the book that states unequivocally that you are wanted, even rejoiced in.”
― Anne Lamott, Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace

“I learned that opening myself to my own love and to life’s tough loveliness not only was the most delicious, amazing thing on earth but also was quantum. It would radiate out to a cold, hungry world. Beautiful moments heal, as do real cocoa, Pete Seeger, a walk on old fire roads.”
― Anne Lamott, Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace

“good news is that we’re all doomed, and you can give up any sense of control. Resistance is futile. Many things are going to get worse and weaker, especially democracy and the muscles in your upper arms. Most deteriorating conditions, though, will have to do with your family, the family in which you were raised and your current one. A number of the best people will have died, badly, while the worst thrive. The younger middle-aged people struggle with the same financial, substance, and marital crises that their parents did, and the older middle-aged people are, like me, no longer even late-middle-aged. We’re early old age, with failing memories, hearing loss, and gum disease. And also, while I hate to sound pessimistic, there are also new, tiny, defenseless people who are probably doomed, too, to the mental ruin of ceaseless striving. What most of us live by and for is the love of family—blood family, where the damage occurred, and chosen, where a bunch of really nutty people fight back together. But both kinds of families can be as hard and hollow as bone, as mystical and common, as dead and alive, as promising and depleted. And by the same token, only redeeming familial love can save you from this crucible, along with nature and clean sheets. A”
― Anne Lamott, Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace

“Opening myself to my own love and to life's tough loveliness not only was the most delicious, amazing thing on earth but also was quantum. It would radiate out to a cold, hungry world. Beautiful moments heal, as do real cocoa, Pete Seeger, a walk on old fire roads. All I ever wanted since I arrived here on earth were the same things I needed as a baby, to go from cold to warm, lonely to held, the vessel to the giver, empty to full. You can change the world with a hot bath, if you sink into it from a place of knowing you are worth profound care, even when you're dirty and rattled. Who knew?”
― Anne Lamott, Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace

“Until recently I barely even knew the signs of welcome, like the way a person plopped down across from me and sighed deeply while looking at me with relief: a shy look on someone’s face that gave me time to breathe and settle in. I didn’t know that wounds and scars were what we find welcoming, because they are like ours. Trappings and charm wear off, I’ve learned. The book of welcome says, Let people see you.”
― Anne Lamott, Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace

“The reality is that most of us lived our first decades feeling welcome only when certain conditions applied: we felt safe and embraced only when the parental units were getting along, when we were on our best behavior, doing well in school, not causing problems, and had as few needs as possible. If you needed more from them, best of luck.”
― Anne Lamott, Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace

“Additionally, I have spent approximately 1,736 hours of this one precious life waiting for the man to finish and pretending that felt good. And I want a refund.”
― Anne Lamott, Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace

“Then it came to me: I was asking the wrong question. The right one is: Where is God in gang warfare? And the answer is, The same place God is in Darfur, and in our alcoholism, and when children are bullied: being crucified.”
― Anne Lamott, Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace

“Grief, as I read somewhere once, is a lazy Susan. One day it is heavy and underwater, and the next day it spins and stops at loud and rageful, and the next day at wounded keening, and the next day at numbness, silence.”
― Anne Lamott, Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace

“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, Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace

“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. Who knew?”
― Anne Lamott, Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace

“I decided to start from scratch, with a simple prayer: “Hi!” I said. Someone or something hears. I don’t know much about its nature, only that when I cry out, it hears me and moves closer to me, and I don’t feel so alone. I feel better. And I felt better that morning, starting over. No shame in that—Saint Augustine said that you have to start your relationship with God all over from the beginning, every day. Yesterday’s faith does not wait for you like a dog with your slippers and the morning paper in its mouth. You seek it, and in seeking it, you find it.”
― Anne Lamott, Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace

“My father treated them with respect and kindness, his main philosophical and spiritual position being: Don’t be an asshole.”
― Anne Lamott, Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace

“It’s like bitch-slapping E.T.”
― Anne Lamott, Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace

“Yet union with a partner—someone with whom to wake, whom you love, and talk with on and off all day, and sit with at dinner, and watch TV and movies with, and read together in bed with, and do hard tasks with, and are loved by. That sounds really lovely.”
― Anne Lamott, Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace

“The redwoods are like organ pipes, playing silent chords.”
― Anne Lamott, Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace