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

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.

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.

Souls of poets dead and gone, What Elysium have ye known, Happy field or mossy cavern, Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern? Have ye tippled drink more fine Than mine host’s Canary wine?

Life is a matter of choices, and every choice you make makes you.

Save when you can and not when you have to.

Lord, grant that I might not so much seek to be loved as to love.

You either spend your life preparing or you spend your life repairing.

Whether you do something or decide to do nothing, either way, you are making a moral choice. And I hope people make the right one.

I’d prefer to wield a rose than to wield the gun.

Make the choice; to be comfortable or to be alive.