You just have to keep getting out of your own way so that whatever it is that wants to be written can use you to write it.
Once an old woman at my church said the secret is that God loves us exactly the way we are and that he loves us too much to let us stay like this, and I’m just trying to trust that.
Gratitude begins in our hearts and then dovetails into behavior. It almost always makes you willing to be of service, which is where the joy resides.
I am an Aries. Although I do not believe in astrology, I think this is exactly the right sign to have been born under.
I write everything as a wake-up call to myself and others, to anyone who may have gotten tired of hitting the snooze button.
Very few writers really know what they are doing until they have done it.
Needless to say, there was no one around remotely fitting the description of a normal person: I was at a writing conference.
Feeding a baby is like filling a hole with putty – you get it in and then you sort of shave off all the excess around the hole and get it back in, like you’re spackling.
Get to know your characters as well as you can let there be something at stake, and then let the chips fall where they may.
Quiet, deep breath after any prayer is another form of Amen.
Evangelical Christians and I can sit down and talk one on one about how much we love Jesus, and yet I’m not carried in Christian bookstores.
This is the Easter message, that awakening is possible, to the goodness of God, the sacredness of human life, the sisterhood and brotherhood of all.
That thing you had to force yourself to do-the actual act of writing-turns out to be the best part.
All parents are an embarrassment to their kids. Often, grandparents are the relief. Kids don’t have to resist you.
We were raised to believe in books, music, and nature.
Sometimes I think God loves the ones who most desperately ache and are most desperately lost – his or her wildest, most messed-up children – the way you’d ache and love a screwed-up rebel daughter in juvenile hall.
Life with most teenagers was like having a low-grade bladder infection. It hurts, but you had to tough it out.
You want to protect your child from pain, and what you get instead is life, and grace; and though theologians insist that grace is freely given, the truth is that sometimes you pay for it through the nose. And you can’t pay your child’s way.
Toddlers can make you feel as if you have violated some archaic law in their personal Koran and you should die, infidel.
Grace is having a commitment to- or at least an acceptance of- being ineffective and foolish. That our bottled charm is the main roadblock to drinking that clear cool glass of love.