“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?”

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.