Tell the truth as you understand it. If you're a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act - truth is always subversive.

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.

And then for a long time there is a silence that is so loud it threatens to blow my head off.

Prayer is the way and means God has appointed for the communication of the blessings of His goodness to His people.

...only the pleasure which proceeds from a rational value judgement can be regarded as moral, pleasure, as such, is not a guide to action nor a standard of morality.

I am an artist at living - my work of art is my life.

I would tell anyone who wants something from someone else to feign not wanting it. People are perverse. If you show great affection to them, they'll run the other way.

I never dreamed of any enormity greater than I have committed. I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself.

There's a lot of mountain climbers trapped inside of bodies of people behind the counter at Kinko's.

The measure of you as a leader is not what you do, but what others do because of what you do.

But I don't like working on lyrics publicly in the studio - I prefer to take them away and work on them in my bedroom.

If you really understand the meaning of be-bop, you understand the meaning of freedom.