“Never compare your insides to everyone else’s outsides.”

You have to make mistakes to find out who you aren’t. You take the action, and the insight follows: You don’t think your way into becoming yourself.

I don’t remember who said this, but there really are places in the heart you don’t even know exist until you love a child.

Laughter is carbonated holiness.

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.

The facts of life are that a child who has seen war cannot be compared with a child who doesn’t know what war is except from television.

When you compare yourself to others you deny that your own magic exists.

Dear Lord, forgive me for all of the times I’ve compared myself to others. I know that You have hand-picked all of my qualities. Help me to see these things as beautiful reminders of Your great love in creating me as Your daughter. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.

No ornament of a house can compare with books; they are constant company in a room, even when you are not reading them.

For next to Death is Sleepe to be compared; Therefore his house is unto his annext: Here Sleepe, ther Richesse, and hel-gate them both betwext.

This made me reflect, how vain an attempt it is for a man to endeavor to do himself honor among those who are out of all degree of equality or comparison with him.

Virginity, albeit some highly prize it, Compared with marriage, had you tried them both, Differs as much as wine and water doth.

It is astonishing how sociable I feel myself compared with him.