I believe in listening to what calls you from your heart and your spirit and if you do it badly, like learning to dance, you do it badly or you’re going to kick yourself when you grow old and you meant to do it.
I’m kind of a gossip hound, but watching the media whip the small fires into giant forest fires so that they can cover the result is infuriating.
I don’t write about the intimate details of my cousins and aunts and uncles, and my mother and my father because it’s not right to, for me.
Everyone is flailing through this life without an owner’s manual, with whatever modicum of grace and good humor we can manage.
I just can’t get over how much babies cry. I really had no idea what I was getting into. To tell you the truth, I thought it would be more like getting a cat.
Pets are the world to me. I think they are the most obvious manifestations of divine love that we are going to see this side of eternity.
For me, being a writer is not an altered state. It’s very ponderous, and very – it’s like being a shoemaker.
It’s intrusive for grandparents to think they’re in charge. It’s manipulative. Also, it’s self-destructive, since if the parents have to resist you, you won’t get your mitts on the kid as often.
I have a giant ego and terrible self-esteem, so I need to hit the re-set button fairly regularly – to get into presence, and humility, and being right-sized.
Frederick Buechner is one of my favorite writers. The Eyes of the Heart is beautiful and wise, full of insight, charm, and tenderness.
At our most primitive we are storytellers and dancers.
A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way. It’s a lie if you make something up. But you make it up in the name of truth, and then you give your heart to expressing it clearly.
When everything starts going wrong all at once, it is to protect something big and lovely that is trying to get itself born.
Learning to love back is the hardest part of being alive.
Good therapy helps. Good friends help. Pretending that we are doing better than we are doesn’t. Shame doesn’t. Being heard does.
Write regularly, whether you feel like writing or not, and whether you think what you’re writing is any good or not.
You must not inflict life on someone who will be resented.
If God was giving me a ham, I’d be crazy not to receive it. Maybe it was the ham of God, who takes away the sins of the world.
The problem with God – or at any rate, one of the top five most annoying things about God – is that he or she rarely answers right away.
My best teachers were mess, failure, death, mistakes, and the people I hated, including myself.