Expectations are resentments under construction.

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.

In making friends, she was wary of people who foster dependency and feed on it. She had been involved with a few--the blind attract them, and they are the enemy.

Don't you know Poole, you and I are about to place ourselves in a position of some peril?

Oh, hell no!" I yell at them. They are not about to negotiate as to whether they get to see my goods. "Denton, I swear to God, if you come over here, I am sending you anthrax in the mail!

They lard their lean books with the fat of others' works.

The world needs more Edwin Morgans, people who can take the language and swing it round their heads and don't care what you think.

I am to hip-hop what Obama is to politics

People think they need to be at a ski-inski-out resort, but the reality is it's not such a big deal to jump on a shuttle.

The dew-bead Gem of earth and sky begotten.

I was the United States Attorney for Maine for three years, and then was appointed a federal judge.

I would dodge, not lie, in the national interest.