“I thought such awful thoughts that I cannot even say them out loud because they would make Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish.”

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.

One thing I know for sure about raising children is that every single day a kid needs discipline. But also every single day a kid needs a break.

Prayer means that, in some unique way, we believe we’re invited into a relationship with someone who hears us when we speak in silence.

Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious.

Pay attention to the beauty surrounding you.

Sometimes I think that Jesus watches my neurotic struggles, and shakes his head and grips his forehead and starts tossing back mojitos.

You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.

Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns.

The soul is that which denies the body. For example, that which refuses to run when the body trembles, to strike when the body is angry, to drink when the body is thirsty.

I’ll smoke pot every now and then. I cannot see a movie on pot. The number of movies I’ve seen thinking, This is probably the best I have ever seen, and then I’ll see it again sober and think, What was I thinking?

To me, climbing is like eating or drinking. I have to do it; it’s part of my life.

The activities of drawing, eating and drinking, all involve assimilations by the self of desirable elements from the world, a transfer of goodness from without to within.

Give a drink of water as alms to the birds which go forth at morning, and deem that they have a better right than men [to thy charity].

Drinking and smoking grass were a part of my life as far back as I can remember.

Eat only when you are hungry. Drink only when you’re thirsty.

if you wanna drink a little bit y’know get your sing-a-long on, come and see the Dropkick Murphys and have a good time.