Mothering has been the richest experience of my life, but I am still opposed to Mother's Day. It perpetuates the dangerous idea that all parents are somehow superior to non-parents.

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.

May your life be a fountain of love and kindness to fill the world with joy.

If you don't love the Dodgers, there's a good chance you may not get into Heaven.

Whatsoever misfortunes there are Here in this world or in the next, They all have their root in Ignorance And in the accumulation of Longing and Desire.

I've only been to Dublin once, and I had a great time. I got completely soaked because it was rainy.

I wrote about my life just as I remembered it. I named names and it's very detailed. Hundreds of Sudanese refugees and people from Africa say that my journey is very similar to theirs.

We are prone to judge success by the index of our salaries or the size of our automobiles rather than by the quality of our service and relationship to mankind.

We can all agree that first loves can be a scary thing, and that growing up is hard to do.

Envy feeds on the living. It ceases when they are dead.

As we live in the Spirit, we live in the process of God’s mind

I feel much more comfortable in politics than I did in book writing. Book writing is so hard. Politics felt easy compared to that.