Everyone is flailing through this life without an owner's manual, with whatever modicum of grace and good humor we can manage.

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.

There are all types of love in this world, but never the same love twice

[T]he accumulation of things not spelled out, not properly articulated, may result in neurosis.

Our beliefs about what we are and what we can be precisely determine what we can be

The injustices endured by black Americans at the hands of their own government have no parallel in our history, not only during the period of slavery but also in the Jim Crow era that followed.

I go to social media, check out my granddaughter's new boyfriend, but the Department of Homeland Security can't figure out they need to be tracking they jihadi web sites?

I want to change as many lives as I can, I want to help as many people as I can and I want to let people know that serving and doing for people is not outdated and certainly not overrated!

I come from the highest class of all. I am a third-generation celebrity.

It is the persistence of dance in helping people to resist, reduce, and escape stress since early humanity that attests to its efficacy.

[Wellesley College] is about as meaningful to the educational process in America as a perfume factory is to the national economy.

Everybody's an artist. Everybody's God. It's just that they're inhibited.