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Book: Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace
Quotes of Book: Small Victories: Spotting
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  1. Anne Lamott _ Small Victories: Spotting

    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."
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  2. Anne Lamott _ Small Victories: Spotting

    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.
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  3. Anne Lamott _ Small Victories: Spotting

    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.
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  4. Anne Lamott _ Small Victories: Spotting

    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.
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  5. Anne Lamott _ Small Victories: Spotting

    all of the great writers drank, except for Kafka and Nietzsche, neither of whom you exactly wanted to be when you grew up.
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  6. Anne Lamott _ Small Victories: Spotting

    Maybe it's because music is about as physical as it gets: your essential rhythm is your heartbeat; your essential sound, your breath. We're walking temples of noise, and when you add tender hearts to this mix, it somehow lets us meet in places we couldn't get to any other way.
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  7. Anne Lamott _ Small Victories: Spotting

    must have been a book-way down there in the slush pile of manuscripts-that somehow slipped out of the final draft of the Bible. That would have been the chapter that dealt with how we're supposed to recover from the criticism session in the Garden, and discover a sense that we're still welcome on the planet. There are moments in Scripture when we hear that God delights in people, and I am incredulous. But they are few and far between. Perhaps cooler heads determined that too much welcome would make sissies out of us all, and chose instead accounts of the ever popular slaughter, exile, and shame. 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. We have to write that book ourselves."
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  8. Anne Lamott _ Small Victories: Spotting

    Every sound is by definition a stop, which is how we can hear it."
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  9. Anne Lamott _ Small Victories: Spotting

    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.
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  10. Anne Lamott _ Small Victories: Spotting

    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. The light you see when people are in the tunnel of deep trouble is domestic flashes of recognition and kitchen comforts, not Blake's radiance, which would be my preference. The sky had shifted
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  11. Anne Lamott _ Small Victories: Spotting

    I have gotten lost all of my life, maybe more than most, and been found every time.
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  12. Anne Lamott _ Small Victories: Spotting

    Who knows, maybe those two rogue leaders, Gandhi and Jesus, were right-a loving response changes the people who would beat the shit out of you, including yourself, of course. Their way, of the heart, makes everything bigger. Decency and goodness are subversively folded into the craziness, like caramel ribbons into ice cream. Otherwise, it's about me, and my bile ducts, and how unique I am and how I've suffered. And that is what hell is like.
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