My deepest belief is that to live as if we're dying can set us free. Dying people teach you to pay attention and to forgive and not to sweat the small things.

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.

A freedom-fighter is a slave to freedom.

I think poetry was always where I went to deal with my deepest feelings.

Philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind.

Asleep in lap of legends old.

There are girls, not specially beautiful, whom you could not lose in a crowd. There are other girls, apparently perfect in beauty, who seem to melt into insignificance.

Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity.

I can 100 percent tell you that I have not gone under the surgeon's knife or had a facelift.

I am never happier than when I am alone in a foreign city; it is as if I had become invisible.

I want to marry her, when I grow up to be a man.

I want it to be 70 per cent beautiful, 15 per cent surrealistically beautiful, and the rest so beautiful that nobody can bear it.