At the end of the day, will God be interested primarily in whether I have been kind and helped others, or in whether I was baptized and how?

Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance.

It is nearly impossible to hate anyone whose story you know.

The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and it was vitality that seemed to seep out of me.

We cannot bear a pointless torment, but we can endure great pain if we believe that it's purposeful.

A sense of humor is the best indicator that you will recover; it is often the best indicator that people will love you. Sustain that and you have hope.

I can see the beauty of glass objects fully at the moment when they slip from my hand

I believe that words are strong, that they can overwhelm what we fear when fear seems more awful than life is good.

We don't seek the painful experiences that hew our identities, but we seek our identities in the wake of painful experiences.

Life is enriched by difficulty; love is made more acute when it requires exertion.

When you believe that you cannot stitch your own heart back together, go to work on the hearts of other people; there is no surer way to repair yourself than to repair them.

They will need you to put the right books in their hands, book in which they can lose themselves and books in which they can find themselves.

We're at a point in time which is analogous to when single-celled organisms were turning into multi-celled organisms. So we're the amoebas.

I took my kids everywhere. I didn't have money for child care, so I took them to college with me and they sat in the hallway.

I'm very much an Enlightenment kind of guy.

I will just put four or five extra packs of cigarettes in my bag and I will be fine.

I am sure all politicians will be convinced of the merits of this deal.

We can begin to open our hearts to others when we have no hope of getting anything back. We just do it for its own sake.

Is there a difference? Yes. We are in harmony with nature, but never at peace.

Love doesn't always come in convenient packages.

It doesn't make your life stop being fun to be a Christian.