And that almost everyone was struggling to wake up, to be loved, and not feel so afraid all the time. That's what the cars, degrees, booze, and drugs were about.

Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.

I do not at all understand the mystery of grace - only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.

Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns.

Dogs are the closest we come to knowing the divine love of God on this side of eternity.

... the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day. [pp. 65-66]

Sometimes I think that Jesus watches my neurotic struggles, and shakes his head and grips his forehead and starts tossing back mojitos.

Nothing heals us like letting people know our scariest parts: When people listen to you cry and lament, and look at you with love, it's like they are holding the baby of you.

Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.

I thought the secret of life was obvious: be here now, love as if your whole life depended on it, find your life's work, and try to get hold of a giant panda.

Human lives are hard, even those of health and privilege, and don't make much sense. This is the message of the Book of Job: Any snappy explanation of suffering you come up with will be horseshit.

Sometimes when you're upset it's so easy to forget what's real and go for what makes you feel better. (131)

We have never understood how birds manage to fly, Nor who the genius is who makes up dreams, Now how heaven and earth can appear in a poem.

Anatoli Tarasov, the guy that created the Soviet style of play, was a visionary. He was a creative thinker. He studied ballet and chess and art and read a lot.

The emphasis on the "peripheries" is also a distinctively "Franciscan" way of expressing the pope's respect for untutored popular piety - a respect, I might add, that was shared by St. John Paul II.

Do believe that if we fail to act in time, it will be the single biggest regret any of us has at the end of our lives.

I see everything through a spiritual lens.

A man's life is what his thoughts make of it.

If He asks much of you, it is because He knows you can give much.

As men, we are all equal in the presence of death.

Sometimes I suspect most of the media commentariat are suffering from Munchausen syndrome.