There is something so tender about this to me, about being willing to have your makeup wash off, your eyes tear up, your nose start to run. Its tender partly because it harkens back to infancy, to you...
There is ecstasy in paying attention... Anyone who wants to can be surprised by the beauty or pain of the natural world, of the human mind and heart, and can try to capture just that - the details, th...
The worst possible thing you can do when you’re down in the dumps, tweaking, vaporous with victimized self-righteousness, or bored, is to take a walk with dying friends. They will ruin everything for...
Thanks' is a huge mind-shift, from thinking that God wants our happy chatter and a public demonstration and is deeply interested in our opinions of the people we hate, to feeling quiet gratitude, humb...
Prayer is talking to something or anything with which we seek union, even if we are bitter or insane or broken.
Plot grows out of character. If you focus on who the people in your story are, if you sit and write about two people you are getting to know better every day, something is bound to happen.
Novels ought to have hope; at least, American novels ought to have hope. French novels don't need to. We mostly win wars, they lose them. Of course, they did hide more Jews than many other countries,...
Nah. But on the first day of class, when I saw that guy nailed to the plus sign, I knew these people weren’t fooling around.’ Lank
My heart was broken and my head was just barely inhabitable
My brothers and I were not encouraged to search for God, the obvious source of solace, but we three kids were led to the world of books, which to us was just as good. We found in books the divine plop...
Maybe what you care most passionately about are fasting and high colonics--cappuccino enemas, say. This is fine, but we do not want you to write about them; we will secretly believe that you are simpl...
Maybe what we say to each other is not so important after all, but just that we are alive together, and present for each other as best we can be.
Maybe it is because music is about as physical as it gets: your essential rhythm is your heartbeat; your essential sound, the breath. We’re walking temples of noise, and when you add the tender hearts...
Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue
Look, if you don't have a bad attitude and lots of things wrong with you, no serious person is going to be interested. If you feel scared, outraged, confused most of the time, come on over. Have a sea...
Late Fragment And did you get what you wanted from this life even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth. RAYMOND CARVER
Jesus said that whatever you did to the least of his people, you did to him, and the lifers in penitentiaries are the leastest people in this country. Just look to see whose budgets are being cut thes...
It took me one more year to admit that I could no longer control my drinking. And finally on July 7, 1986, I quit, and let a bunch of sober alcoholics teach me how to get sober, and stay sober. God, t...
It made no sense that Abraham could head for the mountain in Moriah still believing in God's goodness. It made no sense that even as he walked his son to the sacrificial altar, he still believed God's...
In many spiritual and wisdom paths, it is written that God created us to have company and to be God’s loving eyes and hands on earth. But in certain African Christian catechisms it says that God creat...