Mostly what happens in the novels never happened in real life.

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.

Written soul is called poetry

Perspective alone can make an experience positive or negative, but regardless of which you let it become, it can only have as much power over your outlook on life as you give it.

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear.

There was something so heavy about the burden of history, of the past.

Everything she sang was true. I will leave it to you as to whether the truth can exist with details omitted, or if those lacks make a lie of it.

Round numbers are always false.

There is a passion for perfection which you rarely see fully developed but you may note this fact that in successful lives it is never wholly lacking.

I refuse to see literature as amusement, as a game. I think that you ought not to approach literature without a moral responsibility for every word you write.

You can't invent Google, Facebook or the iPod unless you've mastered the basics, are willing to put in long hours and can pick yourself up from the floor when life knocks you down the first 10 times.

It s funny to see a hatchling like you beaten by the old one.