“You can either practice being right or practice being kind.”

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.

Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don’t give up.

And as it turns out, if one person is praying for you, buckle up. Things can happen.

A big heart is both a clunky and a delicate thing; it doesn’t protect itself and it doesn’t hide. It stands out, like a baby’s fontanel, where you can see the soul pulse through.

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

We have a choice. We have two options as human beings. We have a choice between conversation and war. That’s it. Conversation and violence. And faith is a conversation stopper.

One cannot desire freedom from the Cross when one is especially chosen for the Cross.

The course of our lives is not determined by great, awesome decisions. Our direction is set by the little day-to-day choices which chart the track on which we run.

If I walk with the world, I can’t walk with God.

We don’t reach the light through endless analysis of the dark. We reach the light by choosing the light.

Life is very simple. What I give out comes back to me. Today, I choose to give love.

It is better for me to die in behalf of Jesus Christ, than to reign over all the ends of the earth.

God will never send anybody to hell. If man goes to hell, he goes by his own free choice.