What if you wake up some day, and you're 65... and you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative 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.

My cats inspire me daily. They inspire me to get a dog!

Someone probably a lot smarter than me said hell is other people. I say you're in hell when you don't give to someone who needs, because you can't bear to have less.

As a democratic Socialist profoundly committed to the rule of law, I could not condone, let alone encourage, defiance of the law.

Lord, this humble house we'd keep Sweet with play and calm with sleep. Help us so that we may give Beauty to the lives we live. Let Thy love and let Thy grace Shine upon our dwelling place.

I think, basically, what I'm good for is reading - a lot.

I often wonder if my knowledge about God has not become my greatest stumbling block to my knowledge of God.

And now, with the aid of this common beer glass, I shall play my fifty guinea solo.

I always thought my records were number one; it's just the charts didn't think so.

We have the marvelous gift of making everything insignificant.

The past is not clinging to you; YOU are clinging to the past. Once you are not clinging, the past simply EVAPORATES!