“I just think that if we are going to call ourselves pro-life, we must also agree that starvation and poverty and disease and immigration and health care for all and war and peace and the environment are also pro-life issues.”

I know how I like my house. I like it cute and cozy and a little funky, and I like it to feel lived in and worn, and I like the things inside of it to work. That’s all. And for me, it’s fine that my house’s interior suggests that I might not spend every waking moment thinking about how it looks.

I am not, at the end of the day, a mother, a wife, a writer, an activist, a friend. I am a child of God. That’s who I was when I came into this world and who I’ll be when I leave it. No one can take that from me.

When in doubt, I choose love above any particular ideas offered to me about faith.

You need to remember that being rejected by church is not the same as being rejected by God. God did not kick you out of church, honey. The church kicked God out of church.

I realized I didn’t just want to parent children in my own little home but to mother the whole world. What’s the point of gaining influence if you’re not going to use it?

When I was detoxing from social media, I realized that I was thinking in status updates. It seemed I had trained my brain to translate everything I experienced throughout the day into 140 characters or less.

I’m nothing if not a tangled, colorful ball of contradictions.

I’ve seen my name on marquees and bowed to standing ovations. I’ve also been called a fraud, a mental case, a heretic. People all over the country wait in line to hug me or curse me.

Young people: marry simply, start your life, and party later. Think of how much babysitting for your future colicky baby you could buy with that wedding budget. Think of how much marriage therapy you could buy. Invest in your marriage, not your wedding.

Book tours are super hard for me as a raging introvert. I love humanity, but actual humans are hard for me. So something like a book tour – where I’m constantly on the road – scares the hell out of me.

When folks decide they love any institution more than the individual souls inside them, they’re missing the mark.

I wrote in my first book that I was broken, and now it just makes me mad every time. This is why writing words in books is so precarious. This is why Jesus only wrote in the sand, right? I just – I hate that I wrote that.

We should live out our particular brand of faith, sure – but we should never force our brand of faith upon anyone else. All violence starts with the desire to change others and then never, ever ends.

The Internet is neither good nor bad. It’s neutral – it becomes for each of us exactly what we bring to it.

I think that in order to parent effectively, we are going to have to admit two things: We can’t keep our children safe. We can’t accept the fact that we can’t keep our children safe.

Sometimes when you love someone like a mother loves her child, that love can turn into fear. It happens to me all the time. I am so afraid that the world will not be kind to my children.

Long ago, there was something in me, but now that thing is gone. Now that thing is gone, that thing is gone. I cannot cry. I cannot care. That thing will come back no more.

I attract a crowd, not because I’m an extrovert or I’m over the top or I’m oozing with charisma. It’s because I care.

Let us be very careful that we never exalt any minister, or sermon, or book, or friend above the Word of God.

I live on a ranch in Texas and do my own thing. And I don’t care what anyone has to say about it. My joke is that the only people I’m trying to please are myself and my fans, because they’re the ones buying my records. And I have the best, most loyal fan base ever.

The only way to be really happy in such a world as this, is to be ever casting all our cares on God.

I maintain that to tell a person they are born again, while they are living in carelessness or sin, is a dangerous delusion.

No one ever said at the end of his days; ‘I have read my bible too much, I have thought of God too much, I have prayed too much, I have been too careful with my soul’

I just want to connect with you bros. That’s all I care about, because you bros’ support really means everything to me.