I think one thing is that prayer has become more useful, interesting, fruitful, and... almost involuntary in my life.

it is a serious thing // just to be alive / on this fresh morning / in this broken world.

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.

I don't ask for the sights in front of me to change, only the depth of my seeing.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.

One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began.

Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love and the ability to question. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us.

You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free

Mirth is better than fun and happiness is better than mirth.

The religion of Freemasonry is not Christian

Once you've seen there is another perspective, you can never not see that there's another point of view.

The readers are very similar. The books they know, the questions they ask, the characters they like. That is similar.

The toughness I was learning was not a martyred doggedness, a dumb heroism, but the art of accommodation. I thought: to be tough is to be fragile; to be tender is to be truly fierce.

To denounce moralizing out of hand is to pronounce a moral judgment.

People say, 'Grimm, you've been shot like 50. So why don't you just rhyme like 50? Then, you could get the money like 50, Otherwise, before you see success...you'll be 50.'

The trouble with shooting people, Edie Banister now remembers, is that it's so hard to do just one.

In the end, it is conscience that will have the last word, stronger than all strategies, all ideologies and also all religions.... Peace is still possible.