[Spiritual friendship] is eagerly helping one another know, serve, love, and resemble God in deeper and deeper ways.

The gospel is this: We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope.

Friends become wiser together through a healthy clash of viewpoints.

Like a surgeon, friends cut you in order to heal you.

While your character flaws may have created mild problems for other people, they will create major problems for your spouse and your marriage.

A common vision can unite people of very different temperaments.

Real love, the Bible says, instinctively desires permanence.

Our culture says that feelings of love are the basis for actions of love. And of course that can be true. But it is truer to say that actions of love can lead consistently to feelings of love.

Only with time do we really learn who the other person is and come to love the person for him- or herself and not just for the feelings and experiences they give us.

What keeps the marriage going is your commitment to your spouse's holiness.

Everything is possible and impossible at the same time this is what we live with every time.

On the way out, I hug Mum, holding her close. 'Thank you, ' I whisper. 'For dinner - and for everything.'Mum smiles and strokes my cheek. 'There's nothing to thank me for.

From our birth we are all dying, but some of us finish sooner than others.

If you have to have it, it's ego. If you have to not have it, it's ego. Hold life lightly and it will deliver what you need and release what you don't.

A dog, I will maintain, is a very tolerable judge of beauty, as appears from the fact that any liberally educated dog does, in a general way, prefer a woman to a man.

It is a true saying, that what you fear you find.

I left my job in the fall, and now I can set my life up around writing instead of squeezing writing into my day; it's amazing to have that time, and I feel very lucky.

Those poll ratings go south, I think you have a Republican Party ready to begin different kinds of hearings than [Jason] Chaffetz is unwilling to have.

But you grab a moment, or you let it pass.

Law is downstream from culture. By the time you make a law about something, you're reacting, not acting. I'd rather shape the culture.