Anne Lamott Quotes

only grieving can heal grief; the passage of time will lessen the acuteness, but time alone, without the direct experience of grief, will not heal it.

Grief comes and goes, it ebbs and flows. I think one of the lessons of this for me is that there's no one way to grieve. Everyone does it in their own way, in their own time, and we all process life and its challenges and its ups and downs as they come.

You can't go to Amazon and order a book on how you handle grief. There's books on it, sure. But there's no tried and true manual. You just have to live that out. There's no formula to heal.

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.

That grief is light which can take counsel.

He'd lived long enough to know that everyone handled grief in different ways, and little by little, they all seemed to accept their new lives.

People talk about grief as if it's kind of an unremittingly awful thing, and it is. It is painful, but it's a very, very interesting sort of thing to go through and it really helps you out.

Grief diminishes when it has nothing to grow upon.

When my husband died, people kept telling me not to cry. People kept trying to help me to forget. But I didn't want to forget. [...] So I realize, that if it's hard for me, how much harder it must be for you.

Don't mind all those people who say that you should be back to normal in a month or two. Grieving is all part of helping yourself anyway.

There is no shortcut to grieving.

The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is.

You cannot die of grief, though it feels as if you can. A heart does not actually break, though sometimes your chest aches as if it is breaking. Grief dims with time. It is the way of things. There comes a day when you smile again, and you feel like a traitor. How dare I feel happy. How dare I be glad in a world where my father is no more. And then you cry fresh tears, because you do not miss him as much as you once did, and giving up your grief is another kind of death.

It's possible to go on, no matter how impossible it seems, and that in time, the grief . . . lessens. It may not go away completely, but after a while it's not so overwhelming.

Grieving is like being ill. You think the entire world revolves around you and it doesn't.

Time doesn't. All that Time does is make it more distant, put more space between you and what happened. It doesn't heal anything. I don't know how or what does the healing, but it isn't Time.

Time heals nothing, it merely rearranges our memory.

Time heals nothing — which should make us the better able to minister.

But grief still has to be worked through. It is like walking through water. Sometimes there are little waves lapping about my feet. Sometimes there is an enormous breaker that knocks me down. Sometimes there is a sudden and fierce squall. But I know that many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.

She heard him mutter, 'Can you take away this grief?' 'I'm sorry,' she replied. 'Everyone asks me. And I would not do so even if I knew how. It belongs to you. Only time and tears take away grief; that is what they are for.

Because if she let go of her grief even for a minute it would only hit her harder when she bumped into it again.

They needed to grieve alone was what Tibby's dad said. Lena wondered if really there was any choice in that. Everyone grieved alone.

I think that people always say when people pass away that time heals all wounds. And that's probably the biggest lie. It's not true. I think we all need to remember that it is always still tough, and it's like losing a piece of your heart.

From time to time, I'll look back through the personal journals I've scribbled in throughout my life, the keepers of my raw thoughts and emotions. The words poured forth after my dad died, when I went through a divorce, and after I was diagnosed with breast cancer. There are so many what-ifs scribbled on those pages.

The tears I have cried over Germany have dried. I have washed my face.