It's funny how you can't ask difficult questions in a familiar place, how you have to stand back a few feet and see things in a new way before you realize nothing that is happening to you is normal. The trouble with you and me is we are used to what is happening to us. We grew into our lives like a kernel beneath the earth, never able to process the enigma of our composition...Nothing is normal. It is all rather odd, isn't it, our eyes in our heads, our hands with five fingers, the capacity to understand beauty, to feel love, to feel pain.

If you don't feel free and be yourself, you can't connect. Find people who accept your quirks. They'll heal your soul.

I asked God to help me understand the story of the forest and what it means to be a tree in that story.

If you have a beautiful story, it has to have conflict. If you don't have conflict, it can't be a good story.

When a relationship is right, it is no more possible to wake up and want out of the marriage than it is to wake up and stop believing in God. What is, is what is.

People are lonely. They want company and your book can provide them company and a little bit of hope. And there's nothing wrong with that.

And so I have come to understand that strength, inner strength, comes from receiving love as much as it comes from giving it.