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

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.

... 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.

You can get the monkey off your back, but the circus never leaves town

For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it.

Love makes you a liar.

I'm not fun to bowl with. I take it way too seriously. I have high expectations for myself.

To be heroic is to be courageous enough to die for something.

An education program is, by definition, a societal program. Work should be done at school, rather than at home.

One of the things that made American Pie great was also the sexiness of it.

If the shoe fits, buy it.

The only crime equaling inhumanity is the crime of indifference, silence, and forgetting.

Old sciences are unraveled like old stockings, by beginning at the foot.

We are survivors from the moment of diagnosis.