Needless to say, there was no one around remotely fitting the description of a normal person: I was at a writing conference.

Churches are good for prayer, but so are garages and cars and mountains and showers and dance floors.

Hope begins in the dark.

Everything was coming together by coming apart . . . It is the most difficult Zen practice to leave people to their destiny, even though it's painful - just loving them, and breathing with them, and distracting them in a sweet way, and laughing with them . . . if something was not my problem, I probably did not have the solution.

I said that I thought the secret of life was obvious: be here now, love as if your whole life depended on it, find your life's work, and try to get hold of a giant panda. If you had a giant panda in your back yard, anything could go wrong — someone could die, or stop loving you, or you could get sick — and if you could look outside and see this adorable, ridiculous, boffo panda, you'd start to laugh; you'd be so filled with thankfulness and amusement that everything would be O.K. again.

I used to tell my writing students that they must write the books they wished they could come upon - because then the books they hungered and thirsted for would exist.

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.