“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.

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.

Go on failing. Go on. Only next time, try to fail better.

Once you start changing a name, you see, there’s no reason ever to stop. One always hears one that sounds better.

Better to reign in hell than serve in heav’n.

All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.

No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned. A man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.

You won’t believe what you can accomplish by attempting the impossible with the courage to repeatedly fail better.

It is better to live rich than to die rich.

Every man ought to be in love a few times in his life, and to have a smart attack of the fever. You are better for it when it is over: the better for your misfortune, if you endure it with a manly heart; how much the better for success, if you win it and a good wife into the bargain!