Get to know your characters as well as you can let there be something at stake, and then let the chips fall where they may.

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.

The hearts of great men can be changed.

Home - that blessed word, which opens to the human heart the most perfect glimpse of Heaven, and helps to carry it thither, as on an angel's wings.

If you want to kill the Syrian people, who's going to support us as a government, as officials? No one.

They who secure eternal life are doers of the word as well as hearers

There is only the actuality of what happens in life. The rest is just a story, no matter who's telling it.

Being married is kind of like being a Ken-doll; you don't get to dress yourself anymore.

The dealer for a nickelLord, will sell you lots of sweet dreamsAh, but the pusher ruin your bodyLord, he'll leave your, he'll leave your mind to scream.

I have often reaped what others have sowed. My work is the work of a collective being that bears the name Goethe.

Rickey was never motivated by stats. He was motivated by numbers. Wins, runs, steals.

If everybody feels fear when approaching something totally new in life—yet so many are out there doing it despite the fear—then we must conclude that fear is not the problem.