Give us this day our daily taste. Restore to us soups that spoons will not sink in and sauces which are never the same twice. Raise up among us stews with more gravy than we have bread to blot it with... Give us pasta with a hundred fillings.

But all the while, there was one thing we most needed even from the start, and certainly will need from here on out into the New Jerusalem: the ability to take our freedom seriously and act on it, to live not in fear of mistakes but in the knowledge that no mistake can hold a candle to the love that draws us home. My repentance, accordingly, is not so much for my failings but for the two-bit attitude toward them by which I made them more sovereign than grace. Grace - the imperative to hear the music, not just listen for errors - makes all infirmities occasions of glory.

The world looks as if it has been left in the custody of trolls.

I like a cook who smiles out loud when he tastes his own work. Let God worry about your modesty; I want to see your enthusiasm.

God makes the world not out of necessity but by a divine Whim, and the world he makes is a whimsically romantic place. We're all crazy about each other because we're made in the image of Someone who's been crazy about us.

We were given appetites, not to consume the world and forget it, but to taste its goodness and hunger to make it great.

One real thing is closer to God than all the diagrams in the world