Part of me really wants to believe that hope is entirely available to all of us. We don't have to embrace it. It would be sentimental and silly to say that we all need it, but it is absolutely available to all of us.

The person we know at first, she thinks, is not the one we know at last.

Stories are the best democracy we have. We are allowed to become the other we never dreamed we could be.

I sit there thinking about how much courage it takes to live an ordinary life.

He looks like the sort of man who can't afford to leave, and doesn't want to stay, and so he is doing both at once.

Give life long enough and it will solve all your problems, including the one of being alive.

Corrigan told me once that Christ was quite easy to understand. He went where He was supposed to go. He stayed where He was needed. He took little or nothing along, a pair of sandals, a bit of a shirt, a few odds and ends to stave off the loneliness. He never rejected the world. If He had rejected it, He would have been rejecting mystery. And if He rejected mystery, He would have been rejecting faith.