Maureen Shaughnessy

“I was in the ecstasy of babies then. I was on a long, oxytocin high. Noone told me about this. Noone told me I would feel like a wild animal ready to kill or be killed at a moment’s notice with no hesitation at all right now for my baby. I would sit on the bed at night nursing Lally and I would imagine a lion jumping through the window. I would plan how to kill him. I knew the lion would be immediately dead. I knew that no matter what, my baby would survive.”
― Peggy O'Mara

“I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano

“And I felt like my heart had been so thoroughly and irreparably broken that there could be no real joy again, that at best there might eventually be a little contentment. Everyone wanted me to get help and rejoin life, pick up the pieces and move on, and I tried to, I wanted to, but I just had to lie in the mud with my arms wrapped around myself, eyes closed, grieving, until I didn’t have to anymore.”
― Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year

“I do not understand the mystery of grace -- only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us.”
― Anne Lamott