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

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.

The closer you get to people who are different than you, the more you learn that we’re all same.

Making sensible family rules around cell phones and driving is a way to love yourself, your marriage, your children, and the world well.

I’ve never believed in or understood romantic love. Love at first sight was always a complete joke to me.

I was a little, uh, incorrigible as a kid, so the kitchen was a good place to give me structure and balance. It taught me hard work, but then I grew to love it.

I’m here, just for you no matter how hard life will be for you – I’m yours.

Is it even love, if you have to fight so hard for it?

His students were hardly in a position to tell him when he was getting windy, and he had recently noticed, as most professors did after a while, that his lectures mysteriously seemed to be getting longer with time.

Keep working hard and you can get anything that you want.

Since I was a kid, when I pick up my guitar it’s been hard for me to write some sort of bubblegum lyrics. It’s not really ever been my route.

The road to national rebirth is a hard one, but there is no other.

It’s very hard, feeling that you’re no more than a piece of unwanted furniture in this world.