What fills us is real, sweet, dopey, funny life.

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.

For the light to exist, there must be the dark. For the Force, there must be balance.

We were taught never to give up, never to passively accept fate, but to exhaust every last ounce of will and hope in the face of any challenge.

The minuses of celebrity include having to live with security and the knowledge that you may be stalked.

The most important of all the commandments of God is that one that you are having the most difficulty keeping today.

You look down when you talk to a headstone! When you talk to a live person, you look up! I'm still alive! So treat me like it! Look at me!

Girls like to be played with and rumpled a little too sometimes.

You are outrageously wonder-full and deserve to be celebrated!

Awareness neither dies nor is re-born. It is the changeless reality itself.

I never imagined I'd meet Berry Gordy who told me when he first heard me sing, "You know, your singing's okay, but I like your harmonica playing better."

Black employers are just as negative as the white employers concerning inner-city workers.