Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.

Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.

I do not at all understand the mystery of grace - only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.

Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns.

Dogs are the closest we come to knowing the divine love of God on this side of eternity.

... the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day. [pp. 65-66]

Sometimes I think that Jesus watches my neurotic struggles, and shakes his head and grips his forehead and starts tossing back mojitos.

Nothing heals us like letting people know our scariest parts: When people listen to you cry and lament, and look at you with love, it's like they are holding the baby of you.

Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.

I thought the secret of life was obvious: be here now, love as if your whole life depended on it, find your life's work, and try to get hold of a giant panda.

Human lives are hard, even those of health and privilege, and don't make much sense. This is the message of the Book of Job: Any snappy explanation of suffering you come up with will be horseshit.

Your mind can destroy your life! Mind your mind

No politician is perfect. But in every election in your life, there will be one choice that is better than the others. Go out and vote for that one.

She glanced at the other diners, all of them going into their act, and thought is this what it all boils down to? Romantic love, is this all it is, a talent show?

If you put a woman in a man's position, she will be more efficient, but no more kind.

All science is the search for unity in hidden likenesses.

Wasn't it time she risked getting hurt again, instead of just accepting the numbness of never letting anyone in?

You better arm yourselves to answer your children's and grandchildren's questions... no matter what the question is... without being judgmental.

The Attainment of freedom, whether for a person, a nation or a world, must be in exact proportion to the attainment of nonviolence for each

Nothing keeps me in such awe as perfect beauty; now, there is something consoling and encouraging in ugliness.

More than a rejection or dissolution of the past, avant-garde originality is conceived as a literal origin, a beginning from ground zero, a birth.