When you make friends with fear, it can’t rule you.

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.

The tattoo is there not because I believe there is something wrong with me. It's there to remind me that our flaws are our strengths

You may have the universe if I may have Italy.

A new biography of Madonna came out last week, and apparently the biography lists all the men she's slept with. The book is apparently called the Manhattan Telephone Directory.

We know that someone who has channeled his anger into something constructive has not had a cow. How do we know these things?

I have a dread of sounding pretentious and try not to talk too much about what I do.

Let me say that I absolutely loved writing 'A Common Life,' because it was a book about love.

A match made in heaven set the fires in hell.

There is nothing which wings its flight so swiftly as calumny, nothing is uttered with more ease; nothing is listened to with more readiness, nothing disbursed more widely.

Apart from a very close circle of friends, few people know my true self, and it's normal, I never put it into my music.

I have a ships bed, which totally plays to my obsession of, if I were not an actress, I would be a pirate.