“Life is a conversation. Make it a good one.”

To me, full-time mothering felt like way too much and yet not nearly enough. Lost in a landslide of diapers, birthday parties, and others’ needs, I ached to reestablish myself.

Pain is mandatory for all of us. It’s what teaches us. Suffering is what’s optional. That’s what happens when we try to skip over the pain.

The fact that we define ourselves by our roles can be an admirable thing – it’s how we build a life and make a living. But it’s also precarious. Roles change. Sometimes overnight.

Love is kind, right? It’s not about calling someone out on every little thing you feel.

Integrity means there is not a real-life you and an internet you. The two are one and the same. If you’re not kind on the Internet, you’re not kind.

I don’t want to take anything to the grave. I want to die used up and emptied out. I don’t want to carry around anything I don’t have to. I want to travel light.

Often, we need to ignore the words people say and attend to their underlying, urgent, life or death questions: Am I valuable? Am I loved? The great thing is that the answer is easy: Yes! The answer is always yes. We don’t have to think too hard.

My greatest fear is that I’ll fail my kids.

The hardest part of living without social media was remembering that my little life was enough, so I could just stay there and live it without asking for anyone else’s permission or validation. I realized that for me, posting is like asking the world, ‘Do you ‘like’ me?’

I hated writing ‘Love Warrior.’ It’s the hardest thing I’ve every written. I cried.

Your body is not your art – it’s your paintbrush. Whether your paintbrush is a tall paintbrush or a thin paintbrush or a stocky paintbrush or a scratched up paintbrush is completely irrelevant.

Brave’ is very specific and extremely personal. Sometimes brave means letting everyone else think you’re a coward. Sometimes brave is letting everyone else down but yourself.

One day we will finally see that when we reject any person or group of people, we reject a part of our very selves. All are one. All are in. All are God’s beloved children with a place at the table.

I snap at people I love all the time, and that makes me feel bad about myself. I want to be Zen. I am so not Zen. Whatever Zen is, I’m the opposite of it.

The most important thing on Earth is for all of us to make this sentence true: Compassion is what people do.

We are all trained by Disney to believe that the wedding is the finish line, but the wedding is just another starting line. In light of this fact, we should quit the huge, fancy, debt-inducing weddings.

Everybody wants to be somebody. Everybody wants to be noticed. Everybody wants to be somebody important. Importance is just treating people good. That’s important.

The first time I do something, I’ll probably be good at it.

I believe all woman look good in dresses; is that a crime?

I’m good where I am at this moment.

The more I compose, the more I know that I don’t know it all. I think it’s a good way to start. If you think you know it all, the work becomes a repetition of what you’ve already done.

You don’t have to be good to be Jesus’s friend. You just have to be honest.

Cricket is just something that I am good at, just like various people are good at various things. What’s lucky is that cricket gets enormous publicity.

I have seven children by six different mothers. Maybe success was too good to me.