“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.”

Here are the two best prayers I know: ‘Help me, help me, help me’ and ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.

To love yourself as you are is a miracle, and to seek yourself is to have found yourself for now. And now is all we have, and love is who we are.

Getting into a new relationship is like pouring Miracle-Gro on your character defects.

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.

They build ladders from my spine and they climb and they fall and they break me, and they climb again.

Love may be likened to a disease in this respect, that when it is denied a vent in one part, it will certainly break out in another; hence what a woman’s lips often conceal, her eyes, her blushes, and many little involuntary actions betray.

Don’t show her how well you can love her and then not love her, that’s weak.

All the dreams you planted in my eyes, will someday haunt you alive.

We were a short lived anthology of things no one else could read.

Tear me open and I will bleed in your name. My heart aches from your absence, but in the aching and breaking is where my art is born.

I’m not the one to recycle, and you’re not the one I wish to see in this life or next.

I knew you would leave someday; And from there a poet will be born from the ashes.