Eden, paradise - all the best gardens are imaginary.

[s]he was a compulsive pessimist, always looking for the soft brown spot in the fruit, pressing so hard she created it.

In life, redemption was walking up the down escalator: stop to congratulate yourself, and back you slid.

Religious speech is extreme, emotional, and motivational. It is anti-literal, relying on metaphor, allusion, and other rhetorical devices, and it assumes knowledge within a community of believers.

Perhaps this was the secret to being at peace: want nothing but what is given to you.

Jealousy clings to love's underside like bats to a bridge.

Sorrow can be a bully.

The September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon prompted a fundamental shift in the American government's approach to Islamic terrorism.

There were in life rarely, if ever, "right" decisions, never perfect ones, only the best to be made under the circumstances.

Nothing in life gets dropped without someone else having to pick it up.

Fabricating reality was criminal; editing it, commonplace.

I think it's very hard to find a good friend. That's why I'm so lucky to have two sisters, because they're my best friends, and they have to be with me forever. They're stuck with me.

People think you must be crackers if you've got a psychologist but psychology is part of the building bricks to make a top athlete.

Listen, I have been educated. I have learned about Western Civilization. Do you know What the message of Western Civilization is? I am alone.

She's descended from a long line her mother listened to.

They had so much rain in New York that a lot of the cabbies had their first shower in years.

I know my lies are always wishes.

We need to be willing to risk embarrassment, ask silly questions, surround ourselves with people who don't know what we're talking about. We need to leave behind the safety of our expertise.

One day, you're a nobody, and the next, you're in a movie that everybody is talking about. But Hollywood has a way of knocking you back down to Earth.

Being broken is both God's work and ours. He brings His pressure to bear, but we have to make the choice...All day long the choice will be before us in a thousand ways.

The main problem in developing a deep prayer life is by far the failure to live the radicality of the Gospel, hour by hour and day by day.