“Rock bottom is a crisis. And everyone wants to avoid crisis. But what ‘crisis’ means literally is ‘to sift’ – like a child who goes to the beach, lifts up the sand, and watches all the sand fall away, hoping that there’s treasure left over. That’s what crisis does.”

One of the reasons we stay so alone in our lives is because we’re ashamed to talk about the hard stuff. It’s as simple as that. We’re all in pain in different ways, and we don’t get the help we need because we’re too ashamed to talk about the pain.

To me, full-time mothering felt like way too much and yet not nearly enough. Lost in a landslide of diapers, birthday parties, and others’ needs, I ached to reestablish myself.

Pain is mandatory for all of us. It’s what teaches us. Suffering is what’s optional. That’s what happens when we try to skip over the pain.

The fact that we define ourselves by our roles can be an admirable thing – it’s how we build a life and make a living. But it’s also precarious. Roles change. Sometimes overnight.

Love is kind, right? It’s not about calling someone out on every little thing you feel.

Integrity means there is not a real-life you and an internet you. The two are one and the same. If you’re not kind on the Internet, you’re not kind.

I don’t want to take anything to the grave. I want to die used up and emptied out. I don’t want to carry around anything I don’t have to. I want to travel light.

Often, we need to ignore the words people say and attend to their underlying, urgent, life or death questions: Am I valuable? Am I loved? The great thing is that the answer is easy: Yes! The answer is always yes. We don’t have to think too hard.

My greatest fear is that I’ll fail my kids.

The hardest part of living without social media was remembering that my little life was enough, so I could just stay there and live it without asking for anyone else’s permission or validation. I realized that for me, posting is like asking the world, ‘Do you ‘like’ me?’

I hated writing ‘Love Warrior.’ It’s the hardest thing I’ve every written. I cried.

Your body is not your art – it’s your paintbrush. Whether your paintbrush is a tall paintbrush or a thin paintbrush or a stocky paintbrush or a scratched up paintbrush is completely irrelevant.

Brave’ is very specific and extremely personal. Sometimes brave means letting everyone else think you’re a coward. Sometimes brave is letting everyone else down but yourself.

One day we will finally see that when we reject any person or group of people, we reject a part of our very selves. All are one. All are in. All are God’s beloved children with a place at the table.

I snap at people I love all the time, and that makes me feel bad about myself. I want to be Zen. I am so not Zen. Whatever Zen is, I’m the opposite of it.

The most important thing on Earth is for all of us to make this sentence true: Compassion is what people do.

I find very often that very ugly women have really handsome men and vice versa because they don’t have any competition. Sometimes handsome men have avoided me.

In the beginning we must simplify the subject, thus unavoidably falsifying it, and later we must sophisticate away the falsely simple beginning.

You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.

The heart will welcome destruction to avoid tasting loneliness -why we stay.

The art of crisis management is to raise the stakes to where the adversary will not follow, but in a manner that avoids a tit for tat.

If changes are unavoidable, nothing is permanent. If nothing is permanent, everything is temporary.

If they want peace, nations should avoid the pin-pricks that precede cannon shots.

We must make the best of those ills which cannot be avoided.