Dusk, Night, Dawn: On Revival and Courage
Anne Lamott
Top 10 Best Quotes
“When people know you too well, they eventually see your damage, your weirdness, carelessness, and mean streak. They see how ordinary you are after all, that whatever it was that distinguished you in the beginning is the least of who you actually are. This will turn out to be the greatest gift we can offer another person: letting them see, every so often, beneath all the trappings and pretense to the truth of us.”
“Taking kids outside to love God and nature is just about the most Jesus-y thing we can do. Jesus was nearly always outside with his disciples, or alone with the stars. To take kids to a beach, even one that is littered, it to bring them to an altar (a big one) surrounded by the blue-grey ocean billowing outward like a skirt, flecked with sunlight, like foil or diamonds.”
“Forgiveness, I know now, is maturity. Mercy is maturity. It's slow release, like certain medicines. It's incremental, like traveling along the spiral chambers of a nautilus.”
“We get to--have to--finally release the perfectionism and expectations, expectations being resentments under construction. We can't get bogged down in this stupid stuff. It's actually a miracle just to be here at all, with a few truly great friends, and to keep muddling through, grateful if not sometimes perplexed.”
“Here is what I know of love: Love is the gas station and the fuel, the air and the water. You might as well give up on keeping the gas cap screwed on tight, keeping love at bay, staying armored or buttressed, because love will get in. It will wear you down. Love is ruthless, whether you notice this or not....It will win. It always does, at least in the long term...”
“...this is the work of the Holy Spirit and our operating instructions, to be cooling breezes to sad or worried people, including ourselves, in this sometimes hot stuffy joint [the world].”
“hate to be wrong, and I hate that I am wrong so often in so many ways, that my thinking is often defensive, judgmental, and skittish. (I have a thinking disorder. I once took a 20 Questions quiz about drinking but substituted thinking and I got most of them: Do you prefer to think alone? Do you hide your thinking from loved ones? Has thinking begun to impact your health and quality of life?) Anyway,”
“got dropped off at the airport in a better mood than I had arrived in. In the third third of life, you may become just as miserable and prickly as ever, but you cycle through more quickly. You remember other dark nights of the soul and how by dawn they always broke. You discover that everything helps you learn who you are, and that this is why we are here. You roll your eyes at yourself more gently. You sigh and go make yourself a cup of tea.”
“Whether it's Mt. Sinai, a pasture, a library, the creek down the road, a liveness, or whatever you want to call it, the song is above us, around us, within us. We transcend the incessant and wearying yammer of bullshit. Transcendence means you go from judgement, separation from life in yourself, to feeling at one-ish with the universe. We hook into something bigger than we are - truer than the self-serving stories we make up about life and ourselves.”
“So while I do not expect to get over much, I know that my motley, beloved friends and I have only a short time together left on this merry-go-round, as it spins around the sun, rises and falls. At the same time, these friends are all sort of a marvelous mess: perfect and neurotic, driven and gentle, self-centered and crazily generous, fully alive and probably on their way out. They are chipped and slightly faded works of art, and they are the exact horse I’ve longed for, all my life.”
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Book Keywords:
love, service-to-others, life, contentment, holy-spirit, perfectionism, self-revelation, forgiveness, truth, mercy, expectations, intimacy
