One secret of life is that the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day. Another secret is that laughter is carbonated holiness

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

It's good to do uncomfortable things. It's weight training for life.

Teenagers who do not go to church are adored by God, but they don't get to meet some of the people who love God back.

Certainty is missing the point entirely.

When we did art with the kids, the demons would lie down.

A good marriage is supposed to be one where each spouse secretly thinks he or she got the better deal.

Usually if you pray from the heart, you get an answer—the phone rings or the mail comes, and light gets in through the cracks, so you can see the next right thing to do. That’s all you need.

Only God can put Scripture inside. But reading sacred text can put it on your hearts, and then when your hearts break, the holy words will fall inside.

Prayer usually means praise, or surrender, acknowledging that you have run out of bullets.

First find a path, and a little light to see by. Then push up your sleeves and start helping.

Pain was uniquely one's own, and undiminished by a democracy of suffering.

A gorilla does not budge from a banana thrown at it by a monkey.

But writers and their woes: they couldn't be parted. Not for anything.

Only with a leafcan I talk of the forest,

Rarely do great beauty and great virtue dwell together.

Can I remember "I remember lots," I say. How much of what I remember is true is another matter.

I fell in love with books at the Elizabeth Public Library when I was four.

The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.

Thankfully, beauty is easier to remove than apply, and a swipe of demaquillage in the right direction and you are you once again.

Some say he isn’t machine washable, and all his potted plants are called ‘Steve’. All we know is he’s called the Stig.