If you fixate on the big picture, the whole shebang, the overview, you miss the stitching.

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.

The way a source strains toward the light, toward the air. Its laboring work, its effort, its black passageways like despair. That’s the way a poet looks for words. With muscles, gestures.

Color, rather than shape, is more closely related to emotion.

Our problems are not solved by physical force, by hatred, by warOur problems are solved by loving kindness by gentleness, by joy

Know more about the situation you're facing than a reporter who is writing a major article would.

One of the difficult things of so much travelling is to say goodbye.

Modern China; one also finds many things that are really quite admirable.

A little manic was what their house ran on.

You ever laughed so hard nobody in the world could hurt you for a minute, no matter what they tried to do to you?

A man isn't tiny or giant enough to defeat anything.