He thought about the story his daughter was living and the role she was playing inside that story. He realized he hadn’t provided a better role for his daughter. He hadn’t mapped out a story...

I began to wonder if what we were doing it evangelical circles had more to do with redeeming ourselves to culture than it did with showing Jesus to a hurting world, a world literally filled...

…burying themselves in his arm was more about feeling his love in the confusion, in the difficulty, than it was about having moved past it.

You don’t realize your story is changing you until you look back.

All our time spent making lists would be better spent painting, or writing, Or singing, or learning to speak stories. Sometimes I feel as though the Church has a kind of pity for Scripture, Always...

I think this is when most people give up on their stories. They come out of college wanting to change the world, wanting to get married, wanting to have kids and change the way people...

It occurs to me it is not so much the aim of the devil to lure me with evil as it is to preoccupy me with the meaningless.

It wasn’t necessary to win for the story to be great, it was only necessary to sacrifice everything.

All this beauty exists so you and I can see His glory, His artwork. It’s like an invitation to worship Him, to know Him.

I never thought to ascribe my mother’s emotional and physical exhaustion to the lack of a husband and father; rather, I ascribed it to my existence. In other words, I grew up learning the exact...

Author Toni Morrison swats aside other possible sources of her success and says that the ONLY reason she is a great writer is because when she walked into a room as a child her father’s...

But in so many ways I’m still that kid, not sure exactly how to be emotionally intimate with a girl without feeling weak, not sure my work is good enough, not sure if the people...

Life isn’t memorable enough to remember everything. It’s not like there are explosions all the time, or dog smoking cigarettes.

If you think about it, we get robbed of the mystery of being alive. I think we get robbed of the glory of it because we don’t remember how we got here. When you get...

And if these mountains had eyes, they would wake to find two strangers in their fences, standing in admiration as a breathing red pours its tinge upon earth’s shore. These mountains, which have seen untold...

This message God was communicating to mankind, this Gospel of Jesus, was a message to the heart as much as to the head, that the methodology was as important as the message itself, that the...

I will love you like God, because of God, mighted by the power of God. I will stop expecting your love, demanding your love, trading for your love, gaming for your love. I will simply...

Paul was terribly personal. The books I like are the ones that make you feel like you are with a person who is being quite vulnerable, telling you all sorts of stuff that is personal,...

Dwight Eisenhower said that from the beginning, his mother and father operated on an assumption that set the course of his life – that the world could be fixed of its problems if every child...

When you live countless stories in which you play a sedentary role, it’s an odd feeling to switch stories.

I bring this up because in writing some thoughts about a father, or not having a father, I feel as though I’m writing a book about a troll under a bridge or a dragon. For...

Sometimes when I watch my dog, I think about how good life can be, if we only lose ourselves in our stories. Lucy doesn’t read self-help books about how to be a dog; she just...

People assume when you’re swimming in a river you are supposed to know which way you are going, and I guess some of the time that is true, but there are certain currents that are...

I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn’t resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes,...

A person could read the Bible, not to become smart, but rather to feel that they are not alone, that somebody understands them and love them enough to speak to them, on purpose, in a...

I think if you like somebody you have to tell them. It might be embarrassing to say it, but you will never regret stepping up. I know from personal experience, however, that you should not...

Fear is a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life.

He captures memories because if he forgets them, it’s as though they didn’t happen.

Just out of high school, you didn’t realize you were creating drama for the sake of drama.

I’m perfectly willing to be perfectly human.

I asked God to help me understand the story of the forest and what it means to be a tree in that story.

If the point of life is the same as the point of a story, the point of life is character transformation. If I got any comfort as I set out on my first story, it...

I once listened to an Indian on television say that God was in the wind and the water, and I wondered at how beautiful that was because it meant you could swim in Him or...

I liked this God very much because you hardly had to talk to it and it never talked back. Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

All relationships are teleological, are going somewhere.

I know, from the three visits I made to him, the blended composite of love and fear that exists only in a boy’s notion of his father.

Because it is so scatterbrained and has absolutely no charts and graphs, I’m actually quite surprised the Bible sells.

We were made to be distracted by life, by story.

When I walked into the Christian section of a bookstore, the message was clear: Faith is something you do alone. Rick does not have much tolerance for people living alone. He’s like Bill Clinton in...

The inciting incident is how you get (characters) to do something. It’s the doorway through which they can’t return, you know. The story takes care of the rest.

..[My friend Marco said]. essentially, humans are alive for the purpose of journey, a kind of three-act structure. They are born and spend several years discovering themselves and the world, then plod through a long...

I can no more understand the totality of God than the pancake I made for breakfast understands the complexity of me

When you build a city near no mountains and no ocean, you get materialism and traditional religion. People have too much time and lack inspiration.

All this gave way to my first encounter with guilt, which is still something entirely inscrutable to me, as if aliens were sending transmissions from another planet, telling me there is a right and a...