“What’s the difference between you and God? God never thinks he’s you.”

The miracle is that we are here, that no matter how undone we’ve been the night before, we wake up every morning and are still here. It is phenomenal just to be.

You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories.

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.

I don’t know much, but I understand how entirely doomed I am without God.

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.

Forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a better past.

The road to enlightenment is long and difficult, and you should try not to forget snacks and magazines.

The reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day.

We are not here to see through one another, but to see one another through.

The world is always going to be dangerous, and people get badly banged up, but how can there be more meaning than helping one another stand up in a wind and stay warm?

You can either practice being right or practice being kind.

I didn’t need to understand the hypostatic unity of the Trinity; I just needed to turn my life over to whoever came up with redwood trees.

When God is going to do something wonderful, He or She always starts with a hardship; when God is going to do something amazing, He or She starts with an impossibility.

Churches are good for prayer, but so are garages and cars and mountains and showers and dance floors.

How do you begin? The answer is simple: you decide to.

Gratitude, not understanding, is the secret to joy and equanimity.

If we cannot now end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity.

Differences of habit and language are nothing at all if our aims are identical and our hearts are open.

History will judge us by the difference we make in the everyday lives of children.

It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.

If we’re going to fight a disease, let’s fight one of the most terrible diseases of all, indifference.

One person can make a difference, and everyone should try.

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

That the Devil finds work for idle hands to do is probably true. But there is a profound difference between leisure and idleness.