When hope is not pinned wriggling onto a shiny image or expectation, it sometimes floats forth and opens like one of those fluted Japanese blossoms, ….

I just try to love and serve everyone, and bring everyone water, and lend an ear; that's what Jesus said to do..

Remember that you own what happened to you. If your childhood was less than ideal, you may have been raised thinking that if you told the truth about….

My mother's eyes were large and brown, like my son's, but unlike Sam's, they were always frantic, like a hummingbird who can't quite find the flower ….

Hope begins in the dark..

Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarra….

Your inside person doesn’t age. Your inside person is soul, is heart, in the eternal now, the ageless, the old, the young, all the ages you’ve ever b….

I am an Aries. Although I do not believe in astrology, I think this is exactly the right sign to have been born under..

one thing about having a baby is that each step of the way you simply cannot imagine loving him any more than you already do, because you are burstin….

This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won'….

Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something—anything—down on paper. What I’ve….

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

There are moments when I am writing when I think that if other people knew how I felt right now, they’d burn me at the stake for feeling so good, so ….

My deepest belief is that to live as if we're dying can set us free. Dying people teach you to pay attention and to forgive and not to sweat the smal….

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

Grace means you're in a different universe from where you had been stuck, when you had absolutely no way to get there on your own..

Toddlers can make you feel as if you have violated some archaic law in their personal Koran and you should die, infidel..

There is ecstasy in paying attention. You can get into a kind of Wordsworthian openness to the world, where you see in everything the essence of holi….

Charles had once remarked that holding onto a resentment was like eating rat poison and waiting for the rat to die..

Get to know your characters as well as you can let there be something at stake, and then let the chips fall where they may..

My parents, and librarians along the way, taught me about the space between words; about the margins, where so many juicy moments of life and spirit ….