...since you can't heal your own sick mind with your own sick mind, I needed to consult somebody else's sick mind.

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.

It wasn’t every day a girl lost her virginity, not to mention to a delicious, perfect specimen of man. One who had wings, to boot.

She gave herself a hard twist and fell into a sitting position, staring at me with those maggot-filled doll’s eyes.

I, like you, was not depraved or defected before birth but created to be magnificent, a wonderful and freeing realization - simple but explosive.

Don't let doubt steal your dreams.

Differences will always exist, but division doesn't always have to result.

Music's golden tongue Flatter'd to tears this aged man and poor.

Any kind of history you read is basically the winning side telling you the others were bad.

We know to much to command ourselves very far.

It wasn't until I was in my teens that I started admiring writers as inspirations for my own work, and my earliest influences there were Stephen King, Marion Zimmer Bradley and Richard Adams.

The student is infinitely more important than the subject matter.