Surgery was the most difficult thing I could imagine.And so I became a surgeon.

No blade can puncture the human heart like the well-chosen words of a spiteful son.

You live it forward, but understand it backward.

To be around someone whose self-confidence is more than what our first glance led us to expect is seductive.

Geography is destiny.

The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not.

There is a point when grief exceeds the human capacity to emote, and as a result one is strangely composed-

God will judge us, Mr. Harris, by--by what we did to relieve the suffering of our fellow human beings. I don't think God cares what doctrine we embrace.

Being the first born gives you great patience.

When a man is a mystery to himself you can hardly call him mysterious.

The crookedness of the serpent is still straight enough to slide through the snake hole.

Our imperfection is the perfect experience of being human.

Pretend that every single person you meet has a sign around his or her neck that says, "Make me feel important." Not only will you succeed in sales, you will succeed in life.

Maybe, long ago, we used to be good. Maybe all little girls are good in the beginning.

Part of doing something is listening. We are listening. To the sun. To the stars. To the wind.

It is better to be devoured by lions than to be eaten by dogs. Explaining why his Northwestern teams played difficult schedules.

If I can hit No. 1 on the 'New York Times' best-seller list, I'm thinking of having the entire list tattooed on my body somewhere. It would be fabulous.

Everybody's able to pour into each other creatively, and pop into the studio and pop out. It feels like a community. As an artistic community I think it's really cool.

Contemplation often makes life miserable. We should act more, think less, and stop watching ourselves live.

I've never understood how God could expect His creatures to pick the one true religion by faith-it strikes me as a sloppy way to run a universe.

We must reacquaint ourselves with the biblical weight of the problem that we less-than-perfect human beings contend with in the face of a holy and righteous God.