What's wrong with living in a dream world? You have to wake up.

There's release in knowing the truth no matter how anguishing it is. You come finally to the irreducible thing, and there's nothing left to do but pick it up and hold it. Then, at last, you can enter the severe mercy of acceptance.

If you aren't giving people something to talk about, you've become too dull.

People can start out one way, and by the time life gets through with them they end up completely different.

I think many people need, even require, a narrative version of their life. I seem to be one of them. Writing memoir is, in some ways, a work of wholeness.

If someone should ask me, 'What does the soul do?' I would say, It does two things. It loves. And it creates. Those are its primary acts.

The words were unexpected, but so incisively true. So much of prayer is like that - an encounter with a truth that has sunk to the bottom of the heart, that wants to be found, wants to be spoken, wants to be elevated into the realm of sacredness.