Quotes About Healing

The speaker at the meeting, a blonde woman in a fine tailored suit, shared how alcoholism had stolen her own childhood, and had now come back for her child.

There is cracks, cracks, in everything, that's how the light gets in.' I had cracks but not the hope.

I learned that opening myself to my own love and to life's tough loveliness not only was the most delicious, amazing thing on earth but also was quantum. It would radiate out to a cold, hungry world. Beautiful moments heal, as do real cocoa, Pete Seeger, a walk on old fire roads.

What if Sam's heart got broken again? As with most kids who are fourteen, it has been spackled and duct-taped and caulked back together many times as it is. [p. 258]

Imagining God can be so different from wishful thinking, if your spiritual experiences change your behavior over time. Have you become more generous, which is the ultimate healing? Or more patient, which is a close second? Did your world become bigger and juicier and more tender? Have you become ever so slightly kinder to yourself? This is how you tell.

One has to be done with the pretense of being just fine, unscarred, perfectly self-sufficient. No one is.

Rosie had been a little girl with a dead dad, and there was no getting around that or over that. Even a drunk dad, even an asshole, was better than a dead dad, which shouldn't reflect on you but did, and left a cannon hole in your heart. [p. 121]

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.

They taught us that extending ourselves to others would help us stay sober and sane. But they also wanted us to extend ourselves to our own horrible selves, get ourselves a lovely cup of tea. It was and is the hardest work ever.

I'm pretty sure that it is only by experiencing that ocean of sadness in a naked and immediate way that we come to be healed--which is to say, that we come to experience life with a real sense of presence and spaciousness and peace.

Laughter is deliverance, bubbly salvation.

The people you lose here on this side of eternity, whom you can no longer call or text, will live fully again both in your heart and in the world. They will make you smile and talk out loud at the most inappropriate times. Of course, their absence will cause lifelong pangs of homesickness, but grief, friends, time, and tears will heal you to some extent. Tears will bathe, baptize, and hydrate you and the seeds beneath the surface of the ground on which you walk.

He had the time to hear, like a person who believed there was someone alive beneath the rubble of herself, who heard the soft sounds she could still make from the broken parts that had waited decades to be missed.

They say we are punished not for the sin but by the sin, and I began to feel punished by my unwillingness to forgive.

The lesson here is that there is no fix. There is, however, forgiveness. To forgive yourselves and others constantly is necessary. Not only is everyone screwed up, but everyone screws up.

Grief, as I read somewhere once, is a lazy Susan. One day it is heavy and underwater, and the next day it spins and stops at loud and rageful, and the next day at wounded keening, and the next day at numbness, silence.

Forgiving people doesn't necessarily mean you want to meet them for lunch. It means you try to undo the Velcro hook. Lewis Smedes said it best: "To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.

To heal, it seems we have to stand in the middle of the horror, at the foot of the cross, and wait out another's suffering where that person can see us.

God has smiled on me, He has set me free." For us to acknowledge that we have been set free from toxic dependency, from crippling obsession or guilt, that we have been graced with the ability finally to forgive someone, is just plain astonishing.

the insidious palace lie that we will get over crushing losses means that our emotional GPS can never find true north, as it is based on maps that no longer mention the most important places we have been to.

When we try to see a damaged person as one of God's regular old customers, instead of a lost cause, it takes the pressure off everybody. We can then loosen our death grip on the person, which usually results in progress for everyone, also known in certain circles as grace.

Haters want us to hate them, because hate is incapacitating. When we hate, we can't operate from our real selves, which is our strength. Now that I think of it, this is such a great reason to give up our hate—as revenge, to deprive the haters of what they want.

whatever you use to keep the pain at bay robs you of the flecks and nuggets of gold that feeling grief will give you.

Dealing with your rage and grief will give you life. That is both the good news and the bad news: The solution is at hand. Wherever the great dilemma exists is where the great growth is, too. —Anne Lamott