My mother's eyes were large and brown, like my son's, but unlike Sam's, they were always frantic, like a hummingbird who can't quite find the flower but keeps jabbing around.

Now. Maybe you think it is arrogant or self centered, or ridiculous for me to believe that God bothered to wiggle a cheap bolt out of my new used car because he or she needed to keep me away for a few days until just the moment when my old friend most needed me to help her mother move into whatever comes next. Maybe nothing conscious helped to stall me so that I would be there when I could be most useful. Or maybe it did. I’ll never know for sure. And anyway, it doesn’t really matter.

Joy is the best makeup. But a little lipstick is a close runner-up.

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

You want to protect your child from pain, and what you get instead is life, and grace; and though theologians insist that grace is freely given, the truth is that sometimes you pay for it through the nose. And you can't pay your child's way.

I don't think you have time to waste not writing because you are afraid you won't be good at it.

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.