He also said we should carve in the year and place where I was born, but I said no. As a man dies many times before he's dead, so does he wend from birth to birth until, by grace, he comes alive at last.

I loved rain for making home seem home more deeply, and I suspect that is why, from as far back as I can remember, I also loved those books I read and the people I met in them and the worlds they opened up to me. Like a house in the rain, books were havens of permanence and protection from whatever it was that as a child I needed protection from.

What makes you, in the deepest sense of the word, happy? That's what you should be doing, if the other part is also met - if it is something the world needs.

Sin and grace, absence and presence, tragedy and comedy, they divide the world between them and where they meet head on, the Gospel happens.

Faith in God is less apt to proceed from miracles than miracles from faith in God.

Faith is the assurance that the best and holiest dream is true after all.

We are in constant danger of being not actors in the drama of our lives but reactors, to go where the world takes us, to drift with whatever current happens to be running the strongest.