The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn't have been complete without you.

Lord, catch me off guard today. Surprise me with some moment of beauty or pain so that at least for the moment, I may be startled into seeing that you are here in all your splendor, always and everywhere, barely hidden, beneath, beyond, within this life I breathe.

We learn to praise God not by paying compliments but by paying attention.

Prayers out of, very often, not the most religious part of me, but the most anxious part of me, the most desperately loving, fearing part of me.

Lord, I believe; help my unbelief' is the best any of us can do really, but thank God it is enough.

I don't know that it makes any difference whether it's at this time or a hundred years before or a hundred years later. I think always it's a matter of simply listen[ing] to what is going on around you and in your own experience. Try to understand what's happening, or if not to understand it, at least to appreciate the reality of it.

I'm trying to listen to my past, listen to what's most deeply going on inside myself, my creative set of fictional characters, a fictional world - to listen to that world, to search.