The stars are always up in the sky...then when it is perfectly black, they feel less vulnerable and out they come.

It never occurs to you when you are very young to need something other than what your parents have to offer you.

Love is a big and wonderful idea, but life is made up of small things. As a kid, you have nothing to do with the way the world is run; you just have to hurry to catch up with it.

Adolescents are attracted to tragic heroes. That's why rock stars dress like homeless people. Adolescence is a fall. It's when every child becomes an orphan.

A lot of children grow up in poverty with flawed parents, but their inner world is still as inherently filled with wonder and innocence as children who are kept away from the city's underbelly.

I had a ludicrous childhood, but I feel that I was able to profit from a lot of the idiotic and unfortunate things that happened to me by turning them into fiction.

You see only the beautiful things when you stand still. You only see things that you don't ordinarily notice. The birds are the prettiest things, I imagine.

In the temporary illumination of the headlights, the insects were scribbling out messages from God that we couldn't get.

Adolescents are still children in that they can't yet tell the difference between make believe and fiction.

Somewhere, a sparrow is singing in B minor.

From the way that people have always talked about your heart being broken, it sort of seemed to be a one-time thing. Mine seemed to break all the time.

Sometimes religion gets in the way of God.

The notion that human life has greater value than any other form of life is both unjustifiable and arrogant.

How age enamels us, she would say. It builds up in layers and locks us inside our own skin, stopping us from breaking out, preventing the outside from burrowing in.

You're making sense, old man, a sense of your own. You're not crazy the way they think. Yes...I see...

Kindness is always fashionable.

I always had a really natural faith as a kid. Where I knew God existed and it felt very free and pretty wild and natural, and it wasn't religious.

Doesn't all experience crumble in the end to mere literary material?

History shows that people who save and invest grown and prosper, and the others deteriorate and collapse.

I want my teammates to see that I'm following Christ. But, I'm also human, so there are times I slip and make mistakes but I know Christ forgives me.