“Being a mother is a little like ‘Groundhog’s Day.’ It’s getting out of bed and doing the exact same things again and again and yet again – and it’s watching it all get undone again and again and yet again. It’s humbling, monotonous, mind-numbing, and solitary.”

I realized I didn’t just want to parent children in my own little home but to mother the whole world. What’s the point of gaining influence if you’re not going to use it?

When I was detoxing from social media, I realized that I was thinking in status updates. It seemed I had trained my brain to translate everything I experienced throughout the day into 140 characters or less.

I’m nothing if not a tangled, colorful ball of contradictions.

I’ve seen my name on marquees and bowed to standing ovations. I’ve also been called a fraud, a mental case, a heretic. People all over the country wait in line to hug me or curse me.

Young people: marry simply, start your life, and party later. Think of how much babysitting for your future colicky baby you could buy with that wedding budget. Think of how much marriage therapy you could buy. Invest in your marriage, not your wedding.

Book tours are super hard for me as a raging introvert. I love humanity, but actual humans are hard for me. So something like a book tour – where I’m constantly on the road – scares the hell out of me.

When folks decide they love any institution more than the individual souls inside them, they’re missing the mark.

I wrote in my first book that I was broken, and now it just makes me mad every time. This is why writing words in books is so precarious. This is why Jesus only wrote in the sand, right? I just – I hate that I wrote that.

We should live out our particular brand of faith, sure – but we should never force our brand of faith upon anyone else. All violence starts with the desire to change others and then never, ever ends.

The Internet is neither good nor bad. It’s neutral – it becomes for each of us exactly what we bring to it.

I think that in order to parent effectively, we are going to have to admit two things: We can’t keep our children safe. We can’t accept the fact that we can’t keep our children safe.

Sometimes when you love someone like a mother loves her child, that love can turn into fear. It happens to me all the time. I am so afraid that the world will not be kind to my children.

The closer you get to people who are different than you, the more you learn that we’re all same.

Making sensible family rules around cell phones and driving is a way to love yourself, your marriage, your children, and the world well.

I’ve never believed in or understood romantic love. Love at first sight was always a complete joke to me.

When we shrug and say we don’t care, it’s usually a lie. Every girl cares. We’ve just been taught not to expose ourselves by showing it. What the world needs now is girls and women who aren’t afraid to care – who are done saying, ‘Whatever.’

And here I am, dying in my bed, like cattle die. May the eyes of cowards never sleep.

Don’t take tomorrow to bed with you.

Seeking support from friends and and family is like having people gathered around at your deathbed. It’s nice, but when the ship sails, all they can do is stand on the dock waving goodbye.

Talk to each other. Never go to bed when you’re angry with each other. Lady Antonia Frasier who was married to Harold Pinter said they never went to bed on an argument.

Soon the sun beams will smile through. Before you jump out of that bed, just know, the thought of you was the first thing that hit my head.

Women naturally desire the same six things as I; they want their husbands to be brave, wise, rich, generous with money, obedient to the wife, and lively in bed.

Bright as does the morning star appear, Out of the east with flaming locks bedight, To tell the dawning day is drawing near.

Better to sleep in an uncomfortable bed free, than sleep in a comfortable bed unfree.