I don’t remember who said this, but there really are places in the heart you don’t even know exist until you love a child.

Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you’re conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for...

There’s a lovely Hasidic story of a rabbi who always told his people that if they studied the Torah, it would put Scripture on their hearts. One of them asked, “Why on our hearts, and...

Grief ends up giving you the two best things: softness and illumination.

Most humbling of all is to comprehend the lifesaving gift that your pit crew of people has been for you, and all the experiences you have shared, the journeys together, the collaborations, births and deaths,...

I wish I had thrown out the bathroom scale at age 16. Weighing yourself every morning is like waking up and asking Dick Cheney to validate your sense of inner worth.

Evangelical Christians and I can sit down and talk one on one about how much we love Jesus, and yet I’m not carried in Christian bookstores.

It’s a great time to be alive.

I hate how long it takes to feel radical, militantly maternal self-acceptance.

I’m all over the place, up and down, scattered, withdrawing, trying to find some elusive sense of serenity.”The world can’t give that serenity. The world can’t give us peace. We can only find it in...

Perfectionism means that you try not to leave so much mess to clean up. But clutter and mess show us that life is being lived.

For a life oriented to leisure is in the end a life oriented to death – the greatest leisure of all.

You don’t always have to chop with the sword of truth. You can point with it too.

All good writers write [terrible first drafts.] This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts. . . I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully...

Pay attention to the beauty surrounding you.

Most of me was glad when my mother died. She was a handful, but not in a cute, festive way. More in a life-threatening way, that had caused me a long time ago to give...

The women’s movement burst forth when I was fifteen. That was when I began to believe that life might semi-work out after all. The cavalry had arrived. Women were starting to say that you got...

Life is not a submarine.

‎You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.

With THC in your system, you don’t dream. And you need to. Otherwise it is like losing one of your senses. Dreams are part of your wholeness. … when you’re dreaming, you’re not the one...

If we stay where we are, where we’re stuck, where we’re comfortable and safe, we die there… When nothing new can get in, that’s death.

As a Christian and a feminist, the most important message I can carry and fight for is the sacredness of each human life, and reproductive rights for all women are a crucial part of that....

Sometimes I think God loves the ones who most desperately ache and are most desperately lost – his or her wildest, most messed-up children – the way you’d ache and love a screwed-up rebel daughter...

I have a very dark sense of humor. I swear. I have a very playful relationship with Jesus.

I used to tell my writing students that they must write the books they wished they could come upon – because then the books they hungered and thirsted for would exist.

I hate the summer.

Hope is not about proving anything. It’s about choosing to believe this one thing, that love is bigger than any grim, bleak shit anyone can throw at us.

The problem is acceptance, which is something we’re taught not to do. We’re taught to improve uncomfortable situations, to change things, alleviate unpleasant feelings. But if you accept the reality that you have been given-...

A good marriage is where both people feel like they’re getting the better end of the deal.

If you haven’t already, you will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and you never completely get over the loss of a deeply beloved person. But this is...

What you’re looking for is already inside you. You’ve heard this before, but the holy thing inside you really is that which causes you to seek it. You can’t buy it, lease it, rent it,...

I’m kind of a gossip hound, but watching the media whip the small fires into giant forest fires so that they can cover the result is infuriating.

I like to read away as much of the afternoon as possible, until real life rears its ugly head.

I don’t want something special. I want something beautifully plain.

Some aching beauty comes with huge loss, although maybe not right away, when it would be helpful. Life is a very powerful force, despite the constant discouragement. So if you are a person with connections...

Life is like a recycling center, where all the concerns and dramas of humankind get recycled back and forth across the universe. But what you have to offer is your own sensibility, maybe your own...

Writing takes a combination of sophistication and innocence; it takes conscience, our belief that something is beautiful because it is right.

Mattie sat at the table, obsessing, orbiting around herself. She was sick of her worried, hostile mind. It would have killed her long before, she felt, if it hadn’t needed the transportation.

You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should’ve behaved better.

Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.

A whole lot of us believers, of all different religions, are ready to turn back the tide of madness by walking together, in both the dark and the light – in other words, through life...

My mother might find a thin gold chain at the back of a drawer, wadded into an impossibly tight knot, and give it to me to untangle. It would have a shiny, sweaty smell, and...

Alice Adams wrote a sweet note to me after my first novel came out when I was 26, and I was so blown away that I sent her a bunch of stamps by return mail....

You can get the monkey off your back, but the circus never leaves town

Every Sunday I nudge Sam in her direction, and he walks to where she is sitting and hugs her. She smells him behind the ears, where he most smells like sweet unwashed new potatoes. This...

She slept deeply, but as usual, she did not dream. It had been months; none of them was dreaming anymore. [p. 227]

Human lives are hard, even those of health and privilege, and don’t make much sense. This is the message of the Book of Job: Any snappy explanation of suffering you come up with will be...

I wish grace and healing were more abracadabra kind of things. Also, that delicate silver bells would ring to announce grace’s arrival. But no, it’s clog and slog and scootch, on the floor, in the...

When we’re dealing with the people in our family – no matter how annoying or gross they may be, no matter how self-inflicted their suffering may appear, no matter how afflicted they are with ignorance,...

I was raised by my parents to believe that you had a moral obligation to try and help save the world.