Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
So Rita and I decided that the most subversive, revolutionary thing I could do was to show up for my life and not be ashamed.
I never had a particularly strong craving to procreate, except for earlier fantasies of wanting to be Marmee in Little Women.
Everyone is flailing through this life without an owner's manual, with whatever modicum of grace and good humor we can manage.
The solution is always spiritual, and it almost never has anything to do with the problem ... laughter is carbonated holiness.
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.
Perfectionism means that you try not to leave so much mess to clean up. But clutter and mess show us that life is being lived.
I honestly think that in order to be a writer you have to learn to be reverent. If not, why are you writing? Why are you here?
There is nothing you can buy, achieve, own, or rent that can fill up that hunger inside for a sense of fulfillment and wonder.
I could become like that dyslexic agnostic in the old joke - the one who lies in bed and tries to figure out if his dog exists.
I'm not going to change the way people think about me, but I can say you know what? I'm not going to carry that in my backpack.
I am a terrible and lazy Christian. I do not believe that the Bible is the literal word of God. I just skip about a third of it.
Good therapy helps. Good friends help. Pretending that we are doing better than we are doesn't. Shame doesn't. Being heard does.
The grief and tears didn't wash me away. They gave me my life back! They cleansed me, baptized me, hydrated the earth at my feet.
Reading poetry and reading the great works of the canon that we were reading in the '60s and the '70s and '80s was mind altering.
Because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be?
...after a few days at the desk, telling the truth in an interesting way turns out to be as easy and pleasurable as bathing a cat.
Grace means you're in a different universe from where you had been stuck, when you had absolutely no way to get there on your own.
The beauty of modesty ... a virtue the world doesn't have much truck with: one ordinary flower in a vase, as opposed to a bouquet.
I've always understood that meditation had to be part of - or was part of the natural path and so I've always sort of dabbled in it.
This is a very violent place to live, the Earth, and we're a very violent species. Cain is still killing Abel. We see that every day.
Frederick Buechner is one of my favorite writers. The Eyes of the Heart is beautiful and wise, full of insight, charm, and tenderness.
Sometimes I think that Jesus watches my neurotic struggles, and shakes his head and grips his forehead and starts tossing back mojitos.
Prayer means that, in some unique way, we believe we're invited into a relationship with someone who hears us when we speak in silence.
I remember staring at my son endlessly when he was an infant, stunned by his very existence, wondering where on earth he had come from.
The real payoff is the writing itself, that a day when you have gotten your work done is a good day, that total dedication is the point.
You have to be a warrior and say, "Maybe it's everyone else's system, but it's not mine." (from her recent interview here, on Goodreads)
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.
I feel incredibly successful. I make a living as a writer and am able to help support a big family, my church, my bleeding-heart causes.
... everyone has come to understand that unconditional love is a reality, but with as shelf life of about eight to ten seconds. [p. 110]
If we stay where we are, where we're stuck, where we're comfortable and safe, we die there... When nothing new can get in, that's death.
I'm very successful, but there are 50,000 general interest books published every year. If you don't want to read mine, there are others.
Looking back on the God my friend believed in, he seems a little erratic, not entirely unlike her father - God as borderline personality.
It feels like I'm babysitting in the Twilight Zone. I keep waiting for the parents to show up because we are out of chips and diet cokes.
And she is going to dance, dance hungry, dance full, dance each cold astonishing moment, now when she is young and again when she is old.
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.
Maybe it's wishful thinking, this snaggly faith of mine, or maybe it's Miles Davis saying, Don't play what's there, play what's not there.
I didn't need to understand the hypostatic unity of the Trinity; I just needed to turn my life over to whoever came up with redwood trees.
Sam said to me the other day, "I love you like 20 tyrannosauruses on 20 mountaintops," and this is the exact same way in which I love him.
I understood that the man I was calling for could never ever come back. Because I understood that the man that I was calling for was dead.
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.
If our lives are made up of a string of a thousand moments, at some of those moments we look a lot more spiritually evolved than at others.
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.
Some people may have thought that this book was too personal, too confessional. But what these people think about me is none of my business.
You have to keep taking the next necessary stitch, and the next one, and the next. Without stitches, you just have rags. And we are not rags.
Writing takes a combination of sophistication and innocence; it takes conscience, our belief that something is beautiful because it is right.
I don't have any romantic views of parenting. Every step of the way it's really hard. It's a dangerous world, physically and psychologically.
You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.
Mothers are supposed to listen and, afterward, to respond with some wisdom and perspective, but these things were not my mother's strong suit.
On the spiritual path, all the dreck and misery is transformed, maybe not that same day, but still transformed into spiritual fuel or insight.
Having a baby is like suddenly getting the world's worst roommate, like having Janis Joplin with a bad hangover and PMS come to stay with you.