It's good to do uncomfortable things. It's weight training for life.

Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something—anything—down on paper. What I’ve learned to do when I sit down to work on a shitty first draft is to quiet the voices in my head.

The solution is always spiritual, and it almost never has anything to do with the problem ... laughter is carbonated holiness.

She felt as if the mosaic she had been assembling out of life's little shards got dumped to the ground, and there was no way to put it back together.

You will lose someone you can’t live without,and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.

I do not know much about God and prayer, but I have come to believe over the last twenty-five years, that there's something to be said about keeping prayer simple. Help, Thanks, Wow.

Gorgeous, amazing things come into our lives when we are paying attention: mangoes, grandnieces, Bach, ponds. This happens more often when we have as little expectation as possible. If you say, "Well, that's pretty much what I thought I'd see," you are in trouble. At that point you have to ask yourself why you are even here. [...] 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.