Author Toni Morrison swats aside other possible sources of her success and says that the ONLY reason she is a great writer is because when she walked into a room as a child her father's face lit up.

Reality is like a fine wine, ” he said to me. “It will not appeal to children.

The separation of truth from reason is a dangerous game. I think ideas have to sink very deeply into a person's soul, into their being, before they can effect change.

In church, the rules of the lifeboat don't apply. Church is the refuge where the Kingdom of God is emulated, not mocked.

What good does it do to tell somebody to live morally so they can die 50 years later and apparently go to Hell?

(The monks) approach was far less narcissistic and our tends to be. Their goal when reading Scripture was to see Christ in every verse, and not a mirror image of themselves.

Because it is so scatterbrained and has absolutely no charts and graphs, I'm actually quite surprised the Bible sells.

The actual language of life is not the charts and graphs and stuff we map out to feel smart. The hidden language we are speaking is really about negotiating the feeling God used to give us.

Jesus had no regard for the lifeboat politics you and I live within every day.

The repentance we are called to is about choosing one audience over another.

About the time I told God that He didn't exist, I was desperate for an identity.

Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.

With courage, you can overcome the cultural shock in a visit to a new country.

They always prided themselves on looking youthful. “Forty’s the new thirty, ” they’d joke.Until heartbreak and grief enter your life, and then forty’s the new one hundred.

No matter how you are taught by your teacher about how to recite a poem, it is impossible to wear your teacher's smiling face to the stage. You got to change your own face into a smiling one!

Sides are being divided now. It's very obvious. So if you're on the other side of the fence, you're suddenly anti-American. It's breeding fear of being on the wrong side.

When you get old, it's hard to tell what's memory and what you've kind of created in your head as memory, you know?

Through pop music ideas, energies and resources can emerge that can help the audience release themselves from the unrelieving confinements of environment.

A great speech is literature.

I think I've become a much better singer and a much better player. Years and years of playing a couple of hours every day will do that.

Without mathematics, there’s nothing you can do. Everything around you is mathematics. Everything around you is numbers.