We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason why they write so little.
Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there.
Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.
My heart was broken and my head was just barely inhabitable.
Forgiveness means it finally becomes unimportant that you hit back. You’re done. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you want to have lunch with the person. If you keep hitting back, you stay trapped in the nightmare...
My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I’m grateful for it the way I’m grateful for the ocean.
I worry that Jesus drinks himself to sleep when he hears me talk like this.
Then the singing enveloped me. It was furry and resonant, coming from everyone’s very heart. There was no sense of performance or judgment, only that the music was breath and food.
Forgiveness means it finally becomes unimportant that you hit back.
It’s a great time to be alive.
These are pictures of the people in my family where we look like the most awkward and desperate folk you ever saw, poster children for the human condition.
I’ve seen prayers answered. But often, in my experiences, if you get what you pray for, you’ve really shortchanged yourself.
Sometimes grace is a ribbon of mountain air that gets in through the cracks.
I would seriously rather be in a long line at the DMV than eat with people I don’t know.
Astonishing material and revelation appear in our lives all the time. Let it be. Unto us, so much is given. We just have to be open for business.
I’ve known for years that resentments don’t hurt the person we resent, but they do hurt us.
I get thirsty people glasses of water, even if that thirsty person is just me.
I am going to try to pay attention to the spring. I am going to look around at all the flowers, and look up at the hectic trees. I am going to close my eyes and listen.
Writing is about hypnotizing yourself into believing in yourself, getting some work done, then unhypnotizing yourself and going over the material coldly.
What if we gave fifty percent of our discretionary budget to the world’s poor and then counted on the moral power of that action to protect us?