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

What fills us is real, sweet, dopey, funny life.

Small is how blessings, healing, progress and increase occur.

You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.

You are not your bank account, or your ambitiousness. You’re not the cold clay lump with a big belly you leave behind when you die. You’re not your collection of walking personality disorders. You are spirit, you are love.

Love is so much bigger than our ignorance.

Here are the two best prayers I know: ‘Help me, help me, help me’ and ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.

To love yourself as you are is a miracle, and to seek yourself is to have found yourself for now. And now is all we have, and love is who we are.

Getting into a new relationship is like pouring Miracle-Gro on your character defects.

Laughter is a bubbly, effervescent form of holiness.

Or you might shout at the top of your lungs or whisper into your sleeve, “I hate you, God.” That is a prayer too, because it is real, it is truth, and maybe it is the first sincere thought you’ve had in months.

Butterflies and birds are like one perfect teaspoon of creation.

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.

Knowing yourself and coming to trust your feelings and your intuition will open up your life to greater possibilities and keep you moving toward your goals.

The only thing you can control in life is your reaction to situations as they unfold. 

When I say be creative I don’t mean that you should all go and become great painters and great poets. I simply mean let your life be a painting, let your life be a poem.

Let go of the people who don’t bring positive energy into your life.

Life-transforming ideas have always come to me through books.

We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.

A small change in your mindset can bring a big change to your life.

Let your inner voice be the loudest voice in your life.