“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.”

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.

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.

Forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a better past.

I don’t want to spend my life explaining myself. You either get it, or you don’t.

Never explain what you do. It speaks for itself. You only muddle it by talking about it.

An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.

Make it so good and so clear that it doesn’t need any further explanation.

If you win, you need not have to explain. If you lose, you should not be there to explain!

We stand at the end of the Age of Reason. A new era of the magical explanation of the world is rising.

Feelings you could never explain. That’s what poetry is.

How can I possibly explain that I was just too afraid to love you how can I possibly explain that I still do?