“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.”

It is suggested to us a million times a day that our bodies are projects. They aren’t. Our lives are. Our spirituality is. Our relationships are. Our work is.

I believe in people because I believe in God. I think God knew what God was doing when God made each of us.

If we are going to ask for our daily bread, we’ve got to take the time to receive it and eat it. God provide, but we’ve got to slow down long enough to taste and see.

Questions are like gifts – it’s the thought behind them that the receiver really feels. We have to know the receiver to give the right gift and to ask the right question. Generic gifts and questions are all right, but personal gifts and questions feel better.

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.

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.