“I spent my whole life helping my mother carry around her psychic trunks like a bitter bellhop. So a great load was lifted when she died, and my life was much easier.”

You can get the monkey off your back, but the circus never leaves town.

If we stay where we are, where we’re stuck, where we’re comfortable and safe, we die there… When nothing new can get in, that’s death.

I do not know much about God and prayer, but I have come to believe over the last twenty-five years, that there’s something to be said about keeping prayer simple. Help, Thanks, Wow.

Hope begins in the dark.

My mind is a neighborhood I try not to go into alone.

Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.

I can tell you that what you’re looking for is already inside you.

And she is going to dance, dance hungry, dance full, dance each cold astonishing moment, now when she is young and again when she is old.

Don’t look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.

I’m human, you’re human, let me greet your humanness. Let’s be people together for a while.

No is a complete sentence.

Everyone is flailing through this life without an owner’s manual, with whatever modicum of grace and good humor we can manage.

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul.

But grace can be the experience of a second wind, when even though what you want is clarity and resolution, what you get is stamina and poignancy and the strength to hang on.

I think this is how we are supposed to be in the world-present and in awe.

I’m not going to change the way people think about me, but I can say you know what? I’m not going to carry that in my backpack.

He lives as if death will never come to him, but he dies as if he had never been born.

I thought I was fast but it turns out I’m dead.

Don’t you dare die on me, Bob! I’ll freakin’ kill you if you die!

Since death will take us anyway, why live our life in fear? Why not die in our old ways and be free to live?

But what matter whether I was born or not, have lived or not, am dead or merely dying. I shall go on doing as I have always done, not knowing what it is I do, nor who I am, nor where I am, nor if I am.

If each dead person became a ghost, there’d be more than 100 billion of them haunting us all. Creepy, but cool.

I’d rather be dead than singing “Satisfaction” when I’m forty-five.

What was dead will come to life when you pursue love.