I don't know where to start, one [writing student] will wail. Start with your childhood, I tell them. Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can. Flannery O'...
First find a path, and a little light to see by. Then push up your sleeves and start helping.
This is the most profound spiritual truth I know: that even when we're most sure that love can't conquer all, it seems to anyway. It goes down into the rat hole with us, in the guise of our friends, a...
Our shadow is on the outside. And we can see in the dark: we can see you, we see you turn away, but one day we finally understand that you turn away not from our faces but from your own fears. From th...
For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.
When I asked Father Tom where we find God in this present darkness, he said that God is in creation, and to get outdoors as much as you can.
I get up. I walk. I fall down. Meanwhile, I keep dancing.
I was raised with no religious training or influence. Except the influence was to be a moral and ethical person at the secular level. And to be a peace marcher, an activist for civil rights, peace and...
My mother was a not-too-devoted atheist. She went to Episcopal church on Christmas Eve every year, and that was mostly it.
As a Christian and a feminist, the most important message I can carry and fight for is the sacredness of each human life, and reproductive rights for all women are a crucial part of that. It is a mora...
Take care of yourselves; take care of one another.
I thought such awful thoughts that I cannot even say them out loud because they would make Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish.
What you're looking for is already inside you. You've heard this before, but the holy thing inside you really is that which causes you to seek it. You can't buy it, lease it, rent it, date it, or appl...
There are few experiences as depressing as that anxious barren state known as writer's block, where you sit staring at your blank page like a cadaver, feeling your mind congeal, feeling you talent run...
The trees are so huge that they shut you up.
My good ideas for other people so often seem to annoy them.
I was terrified of death by the time I was three or four, actively if not lucidly. I had frequent nightmares about snakes and scary neighbors. By the age of four or five, I was terrified by my thought...
When humans experience something as powerful as a forest or a rainbow, it is not crazy to assign its existence to a Greater Intelligence.
I hate how long it takes to feel radical, militantly maternal self-acceptance.
I don't remember who said this, but there really are places in the heart you don't even know exist until you love a child.