You can never be sure whether you are discovering the truth or inventing it.

It is not the objective proof of God's existence that we want but the experience of God's presence. That is the miracle we are really after, and that is also, I think, the miracle that we really get.

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.

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.

I believe that what Genesis suggests is that this original self, with the print of God's thumb still upon it, is the most essential part of who we are and is buried deep in all of us as a source of wisdom and strength and healing which we can draw upon or, with our terrible freedom, not draw upon as we choose. I think that among other things all real art comes from that deepest self - painting, writing music, dance, all of it that in some way nourishes the spirit.

The best moments any of us have as human beings are those moments when for a little while it is possible to escape the squirrel-cage of being me into the landscape of being us.

Toleration is often just indifference in disguise.