The real payoff is the writing itself, that a day when you have gotten your work done is a good day, that total dedication is the point.

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 friend is like a poem.

How ungenerously in later life we disclaim the virtuous moods of our youth, living in retrospect long, summer days of unreflecting dissipation.

The poor man with industry is happier than the rich man in idleness.

Meditation is like farming... the right soil is required to grow anything, nothing will grow if the soil is polluted by striving or pushing too hard.

We are usually undone by our lack of understanding of ourselves.

I have a producing partner named Stephen Hamel, and we've been trying to generate material.

I don't want to be cremated, I want to be buried. I don't believe in wasting wood and I feel that one should give back to the earth.

But the smoking is very frustrating. Who knows where it will go; where the story will go; where the character will go? There's still lots of options.

There is only one option in Iraq: that we win.

and where men build on false grounds, the more they build, the greater is the ruine