They were determined to find something mechanically wrong with him - because broken machines are easier to fix. p303

You can call it innocence, or you can call it gullibility, but Celia made the most common mistake of the good-hearted: she assumed that everyone else was just like her.

In a country that doesn't discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as plainly more achievable.

Time itself made all things rare.

Funny how the nature of a normal day is the first memory to fade.

Not that happiness is dull. Only that it doesn't tell well. And of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story.

...whenever a woman describes a man as sweet, the dalliance is doomed.

Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life.

I thought at the time that I couldn't be horrified anymore, or wounded. I suppose that's a common conceit, that you've already been so damaged that damage itself, in its totality, makes you safe.

I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else's story.

My mind is huge with little stories that I never told you.

Athletes and actors do really crazy things and we do them under weird circumstances because we love what we do and because we take things in an extreme manner.

I've enjoyed doing Wolf Blitzer's program, and I even enjoyed having a heated debate with Bill O'Reilly. I will do it any time.

...it was necessary to love silence, but before you could love silence you had to have noise.

I don't have a tailor, but I do love clothes.

When I was in kindergarten, I had one line in a little play. I said, I am Patrick Potato and this is my cousin, Mrs. Tomato, and I heard laughter. I wanted to be an actress from that moment on.

That's prayer to let God's Word speak deep within you and tell you, "You are my beloved. You don't have to take an eye for an eye. No, no you're too rich for that."

Fredrick Buechner kind of loosened up my clerical collar, you might say.

I am realizing how old I am 'cause I am meeting so many people that were born in the 80s, which is crazy to me that I was going through puberty and [they weren't] even alive.

I know not what to do, my mind is divided

Passion is never enough; neither is skill.