Anna

“I do believe that there are frozen places in ourselves - undigested pockets of pain - that need to be recognized and welcomed, so that we can contact that which has never been hurt or wounded or hungry.”
― Geneen Roth, Women, Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything

“My brothers and I were not encouraged to search for God, the obvious source of solace, but we three kids were led to the world of books, which to us was just as good. We found in books the divine plop, the joy of settling down deeply into something, worlds and realities greater than our own troubled minds.”
― Anne Lamott, Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope, and Repair

“Sam, in what way are you like me as a parent that you are glad about?” “Oh, that’s hugely easy. I’m glad I’m hardworking like you, and that I naturally love to play with my kid, and that I’m sort of flexible for such a rigid, uptight guy. I’ll eventually go with whatever might just work. “What Jax will thank you for giving me is my ability to forgive and start over. Not everyone has it, and I can’t believe I do. I’m glad for two reasons. One, that I can do it, even though it’s hard, because you’re doomed if you can’t, and two, when you can do it, you start finding people in the world like you, who can start over, too, and these are the people you want to be with. People who can forgive. “It’s so incredibly humbling when someone forgives you—I can’t ever believe when people forgive me, because you know how badly you’ve screwed up, and how you’ve hurt them, and how hard it is for them to be brave enough to find it in themselves to reexperience the pain you caused, and the humiliation that is in them because of you—and for someone to be willing to refeel that much like shit again, reexperience it out of not wanting to lose you, means how deeply precious you are to them. And that’s pure gold.”
― Anne Lamott, Some Assembly Required: A Journal of My Son's First Son

“I have heard a hundred housebroken Ezra Pounds.
They should all be freed.
It is long since I was a herdsman.”
― Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island of the Mind