I sat down in the sand, breathless with shame and failure. God, I thought, some defender of the weak. Some freedom fighter: Joan of Arc in sunscreen.

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.

it's good to have things done withwhen they don't workit's also good not to hateor even forgetthe person you've failed with.

Men are under as strong a compulsion to invent an ethical setting for their behavior as spiders are to weave themselves webs.

If you go to a lower crossover point, a negative place of power, then the beings there are very unevolved, very demonic, crazy, lower than the people of this world.

Is it not insupportable to be held down to a canter when you long to gallop for miles?

Life is rapid, art is slow, occasion coy, practice fallacious, and judgment partial.

The peace of God is first and foremost peace with God.

Don't play with something you should cherish for life.

Those persons who know the deep peace of God, the unfathomable peace that passeth all understanding, are always men and women of much prayer.

Never drink to feel better, only drink to feel even better.

Human beings as a whole cannot be good for long before the bad creeps back in and poisons us again.