And I felt like my heart had been so thoroughly and irreparably broken that there could be no real joy again.… 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.

heart sorrow grief

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

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

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

More quotations tagged with “grief”

Grief is an unfillable hole in your body. It should be weightless, but it's heavy. Should be cold, but it burns. Should, over time, close up, but instead it deepens.

—Emily Henry in A Million Junes

grief loss body

You see, for me, memories are difficult. Very often, they hurt. A curious thing about grief is the way it takes your entire life, all those foundational years that made you who you are, and makes them so painful to look back upon because of the absence there, that suddenly they're inaccessible.

—Casey McQuiston in White & Royal Blue

pain grief absence memories

Perhaps it is the greater grief to be left on earth when another is gone.

—Madeline Miller in The Song of Achilles

grief death loss sadness

Over and above any spring we may know, outside our windows or in our hearts, there is the illimitable sweep of God's concern for his creation and his creatures; comprehending both suffering and beatitude, and transcending both. No one who has been spared—certainly not I—dare say to the afflicted that they are blessed in their affliction, or dare offer comfort in universal terms for particular griefs. Yet one can dimly see and humbly say that suffering is an integral and essential part of our human drama. That it falls upon one and all in differing degrees and belongs to God's purpose for us here on earth, so that in the end, all the experience of living has to teach us is to say: Thy will be done. To say it standing before a cross; itself signifying the suffering of God in the person of a Man, and the redemption of a Man in the person of God. The greatest sorrow and the greatest joy co-existing on Golgotha.

—Malcolm Muggeridge in Something Beautiful for God

life God man concern grief earth transcendence drama

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

History

21 Apr 2013 Added
26 Oct 2026 Wording changed

Previous wording

And I felt like my heart had been so thoroughly and irreparably broken that there could be no real joy again. . . . 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.