Faith is not a feeling, she says. It's a set of actions. By taking the actions, you demonstrate more faith than somebody who actually has experienced the rewards of prayer and so feels hope.

A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.

Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild.

Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards.

Ten years, she's dead, and I still find myself some mornings reaching for the phone to call her. She could no more be gone than gravity or the moon.

The words and sentences you take into your body from books are no less sacred and healing than communion. Surely at least one such person lives in your zip code.

In my godless household, poems were the closest we came to sacred speech -- the only prayers said.

I find a great deal of comfort and care in my faith and prayer. I'd sooner do without air than prayer.

When I got sober, I thought giving up was saying goodbye to all the fun and all the sparkle, and it turned out to be just the opposite. That's when the sparkle started for me.

I'm doomed to act like myself, even when it's inconvenient!

I believe in God, but even if you don't, you can believe in a self, the person who is innately who you are. Once you fully become that person, then everything you do will be blessed.

I fell into the water with a large splash and sunk like a stone. My feet guided the way as I drifted further into the murky depths. Down. Down. Down.

Authentic people are so comfortable in their own skins they make us more comfortable in our own.

Who but my mother held those small pieces of my childhood? Where would they go when she was gone?

They say no one knows the Bible better than the devil.

Nothing is worth doing at all, nothing is worth writing, which does not do something which will last.

No learning can make up for the failure to pray. No earnestness, no diligence, no study, no gifts will supply its lack.

I take so little interest in my daily life, that I hardly remember to eat and drink.

How beautiful it is to learn that Grace isn't fragile, and that in the family of God we can fail and not be a failure.

Telling lies is a fault in a boy, an art in a lover, an accomplishment in a bachelor, and second-nature in a married man.

Stormy or sunny days, glorious or lonely nights, I maintain an attitude of gratitude.