It is scary, sometimes, Tomas admitted. But the scary bits are what make you brave.

She doesn't understand that doors, walls, fences, ceilings - they're helpless to keep out what determinedly desires to get in.

No bird in a cage ever speaks. What is there to say? The sky is everywhere, churning above its head, blue and endless, calling out to it. But the caged bird can't answer anything except 'I cannot'.

Let me fly, let me see things that are hidden from other eyes.

Love is like moonlight or thunder, or rain on a tin roof in the middle of the night; it is one of those things in life that is truly worth knowing.

Strange how love coexists with hate, how they render eachother mute, how the swilling of them together makes a new and softer, sympathetic thing.

My life was pouring out my feet and seeping through cracks in the floor; yet still I knelt and did not move, for fear she'd let go my hands. Let me stay, I wanted to beg: Please don't make me go.

A small town has as many eyes as a fly

Words on the page are never prisoners of the page

How does one craft happiness out of something as important, as complicated, as unrepeatable and as easily damaged as life?

I am dying: it's a beautiful word. Like the long slow sigh of the cello: dying. But the sound of it is the only beautiful thing about it.

for what is religion if not a kind of madness, and what is madness without a touch of religion?

Serve one another with brotherly love.

Even if you can’t dance, you can shake your body. Even if you can’t sing, you can make some noise.

Real love never fails, never fades, and the greatest expression of it is giving.

Churches need to figure out how they will address the spiritual lives of their staffs and leadership teams.

I saw that my best work was my most personal work, which is odd, because my fiction is very far afield and has nothing to do with my life.

Supreme happiness consists in self-content.

My theory is that the only people who hate hipsters are hipsters. Where I come from my friends and family don't even know what they are. The only people that talk about hipsters are hipsters.

"You marked the minutes," the old man said. "But did you use them wisely? To be still? To cherish? To be grateful? To lift and be lifted?"

The way I think of the psychedelics is, they are catalysts to the imagination.