I just can't get over how much babies cry. I really had no idea what I was getting into. To tell you the truth, I thought it would be more like getting a cat.

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.

He rolled his eyes. "Fiction lies for the truth.

His eyes are peculiar. There is nothing in them, like an eclair without the cream filling. It's wrong, lack of cream.

In the future, I can imagine that we will genetically modify ourselves using the genes that have doubled our life span since we were chimpanzees.

When human rights are abused on a grand scale, the broth of purity boils and feeds the rebellion of a new order.

Education is not an affair of 'telling' and being told, but an active and constructive process.

I have condemned any organizer of war, regardless of his rank or nationality.

'I thought I could live my life without you,' she says, trying desperately to hold back her tears. 'I can't. I've tried and I can't do it.'

My religion recognizes no obligation to resolve doubt other than through rational means; and it commands no mere faith in eternal truths

Not to be born surpasses all reckoning. The next best thing by far, when one has been born is to go back as swiftly as possible whence one came.

Love does not stay idle.