Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.
Joy is the best makeup.
You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.
Forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a better past.
I do not understand the mystery of grace -- only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us.
You can either practice being right or practice being kind.
Not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die.
I thought such awful thoughts that I cannot even say them out loud because they would make Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish.
You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.
A good marriage is where both people feel like they're getting the better end of the deal.
I don't remember who said this, but there really are places in the heart you don't even know exist until you love a child.
Hope is not about proving anything. It's about choosing to believe this one thing, that love is bigger than any grim, bleak shit anyone can throw at us.
It's good to do uncomfortable things. It's weight training for life.
You can get the monkey off your back, but the circus never leaves town
Laughter is carbonated holiness.
When God is going to do something wonderful, He or She always starts with a hardship; when God is going to do something amazing, He or She starts with an impossibility.
No" is a complete sentence.
Expectations are resentments under construction.
My mind is a neighborhood I try not to go into alone.
Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.
I am all the ages I've ever been.
Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue
Forgiveness means it finally becomes unimportant that you hit back.
Because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be?
The difference between you and God is that God doesn't think He's you.
Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up.
The road to enlightenment is long and difficult, and you should try not to forget snacks and magazines.
She said to go ahead and feel the feelings. I did. They felt like shit.
My heart was broken and my head was just barely inhabitable
You don't always have to chop with the sword of truth. You can point with it too.
...because when people have seen you at their worst, you don't have to put on the mask as much.
We begin to find and become ourselves when we notice how we are already found, already truly, entirely, wildly, messily, marvelously who we were born to be.
If you want to make God laugh, tell her your plans.
I worry that Jesus drinks himself to sleep when he hears me talk like this.
If you have a body, you are entitled to the full range of feelings. It comes with the package.
I've given guys blow jobs just because I've run out of things to talk about.' Oh, Rae. Who hasn't
We all know we're going to die; what's important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this.
...most of the time, all you have is the moment, and the imperfect love of the people around you.
I liked those ladies! They were helpers, and they danced.' These are the words I want on my gravestone: that I was a helper, and that I danced.
...since you can't heal your own sick mind with your own sick mind, I needed to consult somebody else's sick mind.
Perfection is shallow, unreal, and fatally uninteresting.
Sometimes grace works like water wings when you feel you are sinking.
The depth of the feeling continued to surprise and threaten me, but each time it hit again and I bore it...I would discover that it hadn't washed me away.
Certainty is missing the point entirely.
This is one thing they forget to mention in most child-rearing books, that at times you will just lose your mind. Period.
It's better to be kind than to be right.
My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I’m grateful for it the way I’m grateful for the ocean.
Don't look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.
The opposite of faith is not doubt, it’s certainty.
...the three things I cannot change are the past, the truth, and you.
Sometimes this human stuff is slimy and pathetic...but better to feel it and talk about it and walk through it than to spend a lifetime being silently poisoned.
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.
You can tell if people are following Jesus, because they are feeding the poor, sharing their wealth, and trying to get everyone medical insurance.
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[S]he believed that the Buddhists were right–that if you want, you will suffer; if you love, you will grieve. (68)
Never compare your insides to everyone else's outsides.
I'm here to be me, which is taking a great deal longer than I had hoped.
Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.
I don't think you have time to waste not writing because you are afraid you won't be good at it.
So how on earth can I bring a child into the world, knowing that such sorrow lies ahead, that it is such a large part of what it means to be human? I'm not sure. That's my answer: I'm not sure.
It was not facing what life dealt that made you crazy, but rather trying to set life straight where it was unstraightenable.
It's so awful, attacking your child. It's the worse thing I know, to shout loudly at this 50 lb. being with his huge trusting brown eyes. It's like bitch-slapping E.T.
Here are the two best prayers I know: 'Help me, help me, help me' and 'Thank you, thank you, thank you.
But grace can be the experience of a second wind, when even though what you want is clarity and resolution, what you get is stamina and poignancy and the strength to hang on.
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.
Being enough was going to have to be an inside job.
Peace is joy at rest. Joy is peace on its feet.
Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul.
Teenagers who do not go to church are adored by God, but they don't get to meet some of the people who love God back.
Having a baby is like suddenly getting the world's worst roommate.
Trying to reason with an addict was like trying to blow out a lightbulb.
Rest and laughter are the most spiritual and subversive acts of all. Laugh, rest, slow down.
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.
Mine was a patchwork God, sewn together from bits of rag and ribbon, Eastern and Western, pagan and Hebrew, everything but the kitchen sink and Jesus.
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.
Jealousy has always been my cross, the weakness and woundedness in me that has most often caused me to feel ugly and unlovable, like the Bad Seed.
Sometimes grace is a ribbon of mountain air that gets in through the cracks.
I’m probably just as good a mother as the next repressed, obsessive-compulsive paranoiac.
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.
Who was it who said that forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a different past?
Rule 1: When all else fails, follow instructions. And Rule 2: Don't be an asshole.
I think we're all pretty crazy on this bus. I'm not sure I know anyone who's got all the dots on his or her dice.
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.
If your wife locks you out of the house, you don't have a problem with your door.
Everybody thinks their opinion is the right one. If they didn't, they would get a new one.
There is nothing more touching to me then a family picture where everyone is trying to look his or her best, but you can see what a mess they all really are.
If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. Otherwise, you'll just be rearranging furniture in rooms you've already been in.
It is hard to remember that you are a cherished spiritual being when you're burping up apple fritters and Cheetos.
Write as if your parents are dead.
I smiled back at her. I thought such awful thoughts that I cannot even say them out loud because they would make Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish.
...one of the worst things about being a parent, for me, is the self-discovery, the being face to face with one's secret insanity and brokenness and rage.
These are the words I want on my gravestone: that I was a helper, and that I danced."
It is a violation of trust to use your kids as caulking for the cracks in you.
Gratitude, not understanding, is the secret to joy and equanimity.
And as it turns out, if one person is praying for you, buckle up. Things can happen.
For too long, and despite what people told me, I had fallen for what the culture said about beauty, youth, features, heights, weights, hair textures, upper arms.
There is ecstasy in paying attention.
Writing is about hypnotizing yourself into believing in yourself, getting some work done, then unhypnotizing yourself and going over the material coldly.
One thing I know for sure about raising children is that every single day a kid needs discipline.... But also every single day a kid needs a break.
... the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day. [pp. 65-66]
To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass.
