I am not writing to try and convert people to fundamental Christianity. I am just trying to share my experience, strength and hope, that someone who is as messed up and neurotic and scarred and...

Left to my own devices, my first inclination is to mess in other people’s lives. I secretly believe my whole family, and really the whole world, is my responsibility.

Jealousy has always been my cross, the weakness and woundedness in me that has most often caused me to feel ugly and unlovable, like the Bad Seed.

Mine was a patchwork God, sewn together from bits of rag and ribbon, Eastern and Western, pagan and Hebrew, everything but the kitchen sink and Jesus.

I watched him carefully. He was making art because he has to, and because he’s brave enough to try and make contact, right there on the edge of madness, where he dreams.

…the three things I cannot change are the past, the truth, and you.

I naively believe that self-love is 80 percent of the solution, that it helps beyond words to take yourself through the day as you would with your most beloved mental-patient relative, with great humor and...

I do not at all understand the mystery of grace – only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.

Mothers are supposed to listen and, afterward, to respond with some wisdom and perspective, but these things were not my mother’s strong suit.

I try to write the books I would love to come upon that are honest, concerned with real lives, human hearts, spiritual transformation, families, secrets, wonder, craziness – and that can make me laugh.

I’ve written six novels and four pieces of nonfiction, so I don’t really have a genre these days.

Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don’t drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor’s yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep...

But you are not your bank account, or your ambition. You’re not the cold clay lump you leave behind when you die. You’re not your collection of walking personality disorders. You are Spirit, you are...

The depth of the feeling continued to surprise and threaten me, but each time it hit again and I bore it…I would discover that it hadn’t washed me away.

Gorgeous, amazing things come into our lives when we are paying attention: mangoes, grandnieces, Bach, ponds. This happens more often when we have as little expectation as possible. If you say, “Well, that’s pretty much...

Life is really pretty tricky, and there’s a lot of loss, and the longer you stay alive, the more people you lose whom you actually couldn’t live without.

I’ve known for years that resentments don’t hurt the person we resent, but they do hurt us.

I woke up full of hate and fear the day before the most recent peace march in San Francisco. This was disappointing: I’d hoped to wake up feeling somewhere between Virginia Woolf and Wavy Gravy.

Will call him a she when the pee-pee is gone. Says “Brave is to endure stares, jeers, prejudice. He won’t.

We all know we’re going to die; what’s important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this.

I don’t know where to start,” one [writing student] will wail. Start with your childhood, I tell them. Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can....

Part of me loves and respects men so desperately, and part of me thinks they are so embarrassingly incompetent at life and in love. You have to teach them the very basics of emotional literacy....

We can see Spirit made visible when people are kind to one another, especially when it’s a really busy person, like you, taking care of a needy, annoying, neurotic person, like you.

One thing I know for sure about raising children is that every single day a kid needs discipline…. But also every single day a kid needs a break.

All parents are an embarrassment to their kids. Often, grandparents are the relief. Kids don’t have to resist you.

I like the desert for short periods of time, from inside a car, with the windows rolled up, and the doors locked. I prefer beach resorts with room service.

I was raised with no religious training or influence. Except the influence was to be a moral and ethical person at the secular level. And to be a peace marcher, an activist for civil rights,...

I thought such awful thoughts that I cannot even say them out loud because they would make Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish.

Teenagers who do not go to church are adored by God, but they don’t get to meet some of the people who love God back.

His art springs out of bubbling underground necessity, as if he’s somehow dipping himself into the river that gave him life; he’s making dream material visible.

A nun I know once told me she kept begging God to take her character defects away from her. After years of this prayer, God finally got back to her: I’m not going to take...

Rosie had to keep her room neat enough so James would not freak out, but not so neat that they could figure it all out, break the code, of who you truly were, what you...

The earth is rocky and full of roots; it’s clay, and it seems doomed and polluted, but you dig little holes for the ugly shriveled bulbs, throw in a handful of poppy seeds, and cover...

I loved every second of Catholic church. I loved the sickly sweet rotting-pomegranate smells of the incense. I loved the overwrought altar, the birdbath of holy water, the votive candles; I loved that there was...

I used to love to untangle chains when I was a child. I had thin, busy fingers, and I never gave up. Perhaps there was a psychiatric component to my concentration but like much of...

I do not have deep theological understanding or opinion, but I do not read the Bible as the literal word of God.

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...