If courage is not there, if the possibility of things getting better is not there, listen a little harder.
I've always thought I could use my brain and my heart to jockey everyone around to the good. But life is not jockeyable. When you try, you make people infinitely crazier than they already were, includ...
I learned that 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....
I know a person with a Ph.D. who goes to a church based on Star Wars: May the force be with you.
I kept asking God for help, and after a while I realized something -- that Josh was not enjoying this either. He was just trying to take care of himself, and I made the radical decision to let him off...
I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises.
I guess he'll have to figure out someday that he is supposed to have this dark side, that it is part of what it means to be human, to have the darkness just as much as the light- that in fact the dark...
I absolutely don't buy into the current mania for tidiness and decluttering. For a writer, piles of papers and notes are a fertile field. Keep all those books you read in college, or had certainly mea...
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. God...
He told me about his monster. His sounded just like mine without quite so much mascara. When people shine a little light on their monster, we find out how similar most of our monsters are.
Gratitude is peace.
Frequently, as so many poets and psalmists and songwriters have said, the invisible shift happens through the broken places.
Forgiveness and mercy mean that, bit by bit, you begin to outshine the resentment.
Every one of us sometimes needs a tour guide to remind us how big and deep life is meant to be.
Do you think that we're wired this way? With the devil inside? Yeah, in the same way we're wired for God. But not to the same extent.
Do it every day for a while, my father kept saying. Do it as you would do scales on the piano. Do it by prearrangement with yourself. Do it as a debt of honor. And make a commitment to finishing thing...
Certainty is missing the point entirely.
But it is fantasy to think that successful writers do not have these bored, defeated hours, these hours of deep insecurity when one feels as small and jumpy as a water bug. They do. But they also ofte...
Being human can be so dispiriting. It is a real stretch for me a lot of the time.
And what do you do in the face of this powerlessness? As a parent?You get to be obsessed and angry, Tom said. And they get to be the age they are, and act like teenagers if they want to. There is a ze...