We've pretended too much in our family, Luke, and hidden far too much. I think we're all going to pay a high price for our inability to face the truth.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

It's impossible to explain to a Yankee what 'tacky' is. They simply have no word for it up north, but my God, do they ever need one.

I was born and raised on a Carolina sea island and I carried the sunshine of the low-country, inked in dark gold, on my back and shoulders.

I’ve never had anyone’s approval, so I’ve learned to live without it.

The most powerful words in English are, 'Tell me a story.'

Here is all I ask of a book- give me everything. Everything, and don't leave out a single word.

I stood face to face with the moon and the ocean and the future that spread out with all its bewildering immensity before me.

Good writing ... involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear.

There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.

The great teachers fill you up with hope and shower you with a thousand reasons to embrace all aspects of life.

It's not the face, but the expressions on it. It's not the voice, but what you say. It's not how you look in that body, but the thing you do with it. You are beautiful.

She was benediction, a touch of faith, life itself coursing through my veins collapsed in age and turmoil, and to my fatigued and weary heart, a new and vibrant throb.

What makes Jesus remarkable is that He didn’t come to earth to lead, He came to serve.

I thank my mother (Ma, you're only second cause you got the dedication), who used to make me write essays whenever I got into trouble, explaining exactly what I'd done and why I'd done it.

Living in a small town [in India] was like living in a glass house!

Power should be reserved for weightlifting and boats, and leadership really involves responsibility.

I watched my brother and my father. The truth was very different from what we learned in school. The truth was the line between the living and the dead could be, it seemed, murky and blurred.

If the church is to impress the world with the deathless hope of the everlasting Gospel, she must be animated by that hope herself.

God is the true realistic point where human reason mostly, if not completely, breaks down.

Evangelism and the local church are inseparable. It's like the Good Samaritan seeking an inn for the one he rescued.