My father was a writer, so I grew up writing and reading and I was really encouraged by him.

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.

Which came first: the change-ready company or the change-ready employee?

Pain is never added to pain. It multiplies.

Since we have to make choices in life, why not choose the good ones?

No, Carolyn, you can’t petition PETA to get a waiver from dissecting the frog. The frog’s already dead. It donated itself to science. Don’t let its sacrifice be in vain. -Brandon

…and there, in the background, the sky’s sediment had sunk to a place where all the woe of the words ‘I am’ dissolved into blue peace. He said it. ‘The ocean.

The general root of superstition is that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss, and commit to memory the one, and pass over the other.

There are people that will try to hurt you and hold you down.

Verily, verily, I say unto you, The servant is not greater than his lord; neither he that is sent greater than he that sent him.

There's no ifs and buts or maybes, you're gonna miss, you're gonna miss my loving.

The dialogue between what's going on in the world and what's going on internally seems to be a natural thing - well, it's natural to me, anyway, to have these thoughts.