“This is one thing they forget to mention in most child-rearing books, that at times you will just lose your mind. Period.”

A good marriage is where both people feel like they’re getting the better end of the deal.

Your inside person doesn’t age. Your inside person is soul, is heart, in the eternal now, the ageless, the old, the young, all the ages you’ve ever been.

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 am convinced that the norm in Russia should become a family with three children.

I have very good executives and great children. They’re very good.

As a child I grew up with a school curriculum that totally glossed over British colonialism and British slavery.

I think it’s really good for a family or children to have a dog, cat, bird or whatever to grow up with.

We must protect the safety of our children at all costs.

Reading one book a day to your child can change the trajectory of their future.

When you grow up and have children of your own, do please remember something important: a stodgy parent is no fun at all. What a child wants and deserves is a parent who is sparky.

I wonder if anyone can ever succeed in making their children content.