What if we gave fifty percent of our discretionary budget to the world’s poor and then counted on the moral power of that action to protect us?

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.

The bubbly play of wit, the chesty laughs, the resonant voices of men when glass in hand they shut the grey world outside and prod their brains with the fun and folly of an accelerated pulse.

all children are required to attend School, which is like a party to which everyone forgot to bring punch, or hats, or fiddles, and none of the games have good prizes.

When frying small fish, disturb them little.

Apparently vodka helps flowers last longer when they're dying. But you can put vodka in anything and it'll make it better.

Politics also means educating people. It's important to speak openly with our fellow Greeks, to tell them what our problems are and that we have to change something.

You can't make a cloudy day a sunny day, but can embrace it and decide it's going to be a good day after all.

Bachelor's degrees make pretty good placemats if you get 'em laminated.

It often is a terrible insult to some families if one of the kids turns out to be an artist and that's one way to really shake up the family if you haven't got nerve enough to turn into a homosexual.

I don't look at ratings until somebody tells me.

I almost took the door off the car