I think drugs are part of the magical possibilities of youth and I wouldn't be here if I had continued with it.

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.

You can disagree with another person's opinions. You can disagree with their doctrines. You can't disagree with their experience.

Family ... the home of all social evil, a charitable institution for comfortable women, an anchorage for house-fathers, and a hell for children.

The dust of thirty years hung lifeless in shafts of morning light, the gilding of perfectly prim pages shone incanescent, the shriek of rolling ladders mourned in perennial soliloquy.

Vietnam was a country where America was trying to make people stop being communists by dropping things on them from airplanes.

I had but one love and it is gone and now there is nothing and I tell you, that is the most awful feeling in the world.

It's the contemporary woman that movies don't know what to do with, other than bathe her in a bridal glow in romantic comedies where both the romance and the comedy are artificial sweeteners.

Fear the sins that you commit in secret, because the Witness of those sins is the Judge Himself!

Nothing so obstinately stands in the way of all sorts of progress as pride of opinion. While nothing is so foolish and baseless.

I knew the facts of death before I knew the facts of life. There never was a time when I didn't see the skull beneath the skin.

A man is most accurately judged by how he treats those who are not in a position either to retaliate or to reciprocate.