Can you imagine the hopelessness of trying to live a spiritual life when you’re secretly looking up at the skies not for illumination or direction, but to gauge, miserably, the odds of rain?

... one of the immutable laws of being human is that the people who show up are the right people. [p. 65]

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.

When you make friends with fear, it can’t rule you.

If you fixate on the big picture, the whole shebang, the overview, you miss the stitching.

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.

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?