I came to see that what constitutes strength is not just a muscle or will. It can also include the most desperate vulnerability, the saddest heartache, the lightest, sweetest laughter.

How anyone becomes herself/is a mystery.

Strength means...acknowledging each of those feelings, your questions and ideas and faith and terror, and meeting what comes with the full force of your heart.

Strength means honoring your entire range of emotion, even your despair and heartbreak.

You are not broken. You break again and again because that's what breaking means. To be whole.

What if all possible pain was only the grief of truth?

Death and life are, for most of us, too complex to comprehend, but Alex Lemon can pretty casually, accurately, and marvelously correlate them to heavy metal and birthday cake.

I've been melted into something too easy to spill. I make more and more of myself in order to make more and more of the baby. He takes it, this making. And somehow he's made more of me, too.

We never solve the big questions

I love the dark hours of my being.My mind deepens into them.There I can find, as in old letters, the days of my life, already lived, and held like a legend, and understood.

It is important to keep in mind that our bodies must work pretty well, or their wouldn't be so many humans on the planet.

We are our own worst enemy and make no mistake we are destroying ourselves.

Prayerlessness is sin.

I have to pick myself up every day and say, 'The show must go on,' meaning life as I know it must go on, whatever the obstacle is, I know I can handle it, and I can get through it.

Hope and fear are both phantoms that arise from thinking of the self. When we don't see the self as self, what do we have to fear?

Whether you like it or not, alcohol helps to create emotional links between humans, too.

[Goodman] became famous (or notorious) for staring at a player he didn't like. It was called 'the ray' by his men.

I think by the time I finished college I was calling myself a professional because I was, you know. I was making a living playing music.