If you haven't already, you will lose someone you can't live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and you never completely get over the loss of a deeply beloved person. But this is also good news. The person lives forever, in your broken heart that doesn't seal back up. And you come through, and you learn to dance with the banged-up heart.

—Anne Lamott in Plan B

love good loss broken hearted

About Anne Lamott

Portrait of Anne Lamott

Anne Lamott (born April 10, 1954) is an American novelist and nonfiction writer.

More quotations from Anne Lamott

Getting found almost always means being lost for a while.

—Anne Lamott in Small Victories

seeking lost found

When I was a child, I thought grown-ups and teachers knew the truth, because they told me they did. It took years for me to discover that the first step in finding out the truth is to begin unlearning almost everything adults had taught me, and to start doing all the things they'd told me NOT to do. Their main pitch was that achievement equaled happiness, when all you had to do was study rock stars, or movie stars, or them, to see that they were mostly miserable.

—Anne Lamott in Grace (Eventually)

I think that is why we stay close to our families, no matter how neurotic the members, how deeply annoying or dull—because when people have seen you at your worst, you don't have to put on the mask as much.

—Anne Lamott in Traveling Mercies

A good marriage is where both people feel like they're getting the better end of the deal.

—Anne Lamott in Joe Jones

Age has given me what I was looking for my entire life—it has given me me. It has provided time and experience and failures and triumphs and time-tested friends who have helped me step into the shape that was waiting for me. I fit into me now. I have an organic life, finally, not necessarily the one people imagined for me, or tried to get me to have. I have the life I longed for. I have become the woman I hardly dared imagine I would be.

—Anne Lamott in Plan B

More quotations tagged with “loss”

I can't pretend to know what it feels like to lose a child, but I assume it's the worst pain I've ever felt times a thousand, or times a hundred thousand.

—Elin Hilderbrand in The Identicals

children pain loss

There was just something about her dying that I had understood but not really understood, if you know what I mean. I mean, you can know someone is dying on an intellectual level, but emotionally it hasn't really hit you.

—Jesse Andrews in Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

intellect death loss emotion

When a daughter loses a mother, the intervals between grief responses lengthen over time, but her longing never disappears. It always hovers at the edge of her awareness, ready to surface at any time, in any place, in the least expected ways. This isn't pathological. It's normal. It's why you find yourself, at twenty-four, or thirty-five or forty-three, unwrapping a present or walking down an aisle or crossing a busy street, doubled over and missing your mother.

—Hope Edelman in Motherless Daughters

grief loss mother daughter

Nothing prepared me for the loss of my mother. Even knowing that she would die did not prepare me. A mother, after all, is your entry into the world. She is the shell in which you divide and become a life. Waking up in a world without her is like waking up in a world without sky: unimaginable.

—Meghan O'Rourke in The Long Goodbye

life death loss mother

The more loss we feel, the more grateful we should be for whatever it was we had to lose. It means that we had something worth grieving for. The ones I'm sorry for are the ones that go through life not knowing what grief is.

—Frank O'Connor

gratitude grief loss

History

16 Jan 2019 Added