The Amen is only as good as the attitude. If you are trying to finish up quickly so you can check your cell phone messages, you are missing the chance to spend quiet moments with the giver of life and...
Sometimes grace works like water wings when you feel you are sinking.
She slept deeply, but as usual, she did not dream. It had been months; none of them was dreaming anymore. [p. 227]
Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist’s true friend.
Opening myself to my own love and to life's tough loveliness not only was the most delicious, amazing thing on earth but also was quantum. It would radiate out to a cold, hungry world. Beautiful momen...
One rarely knows where to begin the search for meaning, though by necessity, we can only start where we are.
Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding space,’ to quote the late, great Zora Neale Hurston. It
Like the Buddha and Jesus, who knew they couldn’t control our lives, but could infuse lives with their selves, we have been graced with a few people.
Life is like a nice fresh batch of Swiss cheese. Note to self: savor the holes, too, like the spaces between musical notes.
Kindness toward others and radical kindness to ourselves buy us a shot at a warm and generous heart, which is the greatest prize of all.
Jesus was soft on crime. He’d never have been elected anything.
It's good to do uncomfortable things. It's weight training for life.
In paintings, music, poetry, architecture, we feel the elusive energy that moves through us and the air and the ground all the time, that usually disperses and turns chaotic in our busy-ness and distr...
I try to write the books I would love to come upon, that are honest, concerned with real lives, human hearts, spiritual transformation, families, secrets, wonder, craziness—and that can make me laugh....
I remind myself nearly every day of something that a doctor told me six months before my friend Pammy died. This was a doctor who always gave me straight answers. When I called on this one particular...
And I felt like my heart had been so thoroughly and irreparably broken that there could be no real joy again, that at best there might eventually be a little contentment. Everyone wanted me to get hel...
All good writers write [terrible first drafts.] This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts. . . I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully an...
One of the immutable laws of being human is that the people who show up are the right people. [p. 65]
Oh my God, what if you wake up some day, and you're 65, or 75, and you never got your memoir or novel written, or you didn't go swimming in those warm pools and oceans all those years because your thi...
Tom has been having a difficult patch, and we meet at the church of IKEA as often as possible, because it is equidistant from our houses and always cheers us up. Yesterday I asked, 'In your depression...