My experience as a writer is that you really do write seven and eight pages to find the paragraph you were after all along.

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.

Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.

that a child is not an event, alleged or otherwise, a mistake or accident or crime. . . he is by definition more than this, sum rather than division, a living promissory note.

I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life.

When people ask me why I don't eat meat or any other animal products, I say, 'Because they are unhealthy and they are the product of a violent and inhumane industry.'

Dictators are not in the business of allowing elections that could remove them from their thrones.

I think we all depend on a significant other, and we think if they leave me, I'll die. But that's not true. We're all much stronger than we think we are.

Repetition on things like that becomes quite painful. If you do a stunt sometimes it can look like a stunt.

I feel like I'm a kid again.

Life doesn't happen to us, but happens with us.

I'm the kind of person who doesn't wait for opportunities to fall from the sky.