“Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don’t give up.”

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.

The road to tyranny, we must never forget, begins with the destruction of the truth.

There never was a winner, who wasn’t a beginner.

Once you begin being naughty, it is easier to go and on and on, and sooner or later something dreadful happens.

He pleaded so much that he lost his voice. His bones began to fill with words.

There is no way in which a simple substance could begin in the course of nature, since it cannot be formed by means of compounding.

Peace, like charity, begins at home.

Do not have your concert first, and then tune your instrument afterwards. Begin the day with the Word of God and prayer, and get first of all into harmony with Him.

We’d never get anything fixed to suit us if we waited for things to suit us before we started.