We must not inflict life on children who will be resented; we must not inflict unwanted children on society.

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 teacher will be frustrated if she is only motivated to teach what she has learned. Yet, if she is motivated because of the students, then she will learn from them how to teach.

I never saw a Purple Cow I never hope to see one: But I can tell you anyhow I'd rather see than be one.

Fall in love with a dog, and in many ways you enter a new orbit, a universe that features not just new colors but new rituals, new rules, a new way of experiencing attachment.

Was this what it meant to love someone? That any burden was a burden shared, that they could give you comfort with a word or a touch?

I must begin with a good body of facts and not from a principle (in which I always suspect some fallacy) and then as much deduction as you please.

Your pain is an opportunity for you to learn about yourself.

I think that not being perfect has given me the freedom to keep getting better.

Symptoms like anxiety, depression, aggression, alcohol or drug use, are responses to physical and emotional pain that has its roots in traumatic experiences from childhood and later in life.

Nature does not suffer her veil to be taken from her, and what she does not choose to reveal to the spirit, thou wilt not wrest from her by levers and screws.

If singing was a color, it would've been the color of that chocolate.