Never compare your insides to everyone else's outsides..

The first holy truth in God 101 is that men and women of true faith have always had to accept the mystery of God's identity and love and ways. I hate….

I sat down in the sand, breathless with shame and failure. God, I thought, some defender of the weak. Some freedom fighter: Joan of Arc in sunscreen..

Over and over I feel as if my characters know who they are, and what happens to them, and where they have been and where they will go, and what they ….

No matter how people mess with you or let you down, or how you let yourself down, a good book means that when you get in bed that night, you have a g….

Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you..

No one is more sentimentalized in America than mothers on Mother's Day, but no one is more often blamed for the culture's bad people and behavior..

I can tell you that what you're looking for is already inside you..

You will lose someone you can’t live without,and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of ….

Close friendships are one of life's miracles - that a few people get to know you deeply, all your messy or shadowy stuff along with the beauty and sw….

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..

Gratitude, not understanding, is the secret to joy and equanimity..

But grace can be the experience of a second wind, when even though what you want is clarity and resolution, what you get is stamina and poignancy and….

It helps to resign as the controller of your fate. All that energy we expend to keep things running right is not what's keeping things running right.….

They always threw their arms around and hugged me while crying our Yiddish endearments. Yet none of them believed in God. They believed in social jus….

I’m probably just as good a mother as the next repressed, obsessive-compulsive paranoiac..

I write everything as a wake-up call to myself and others, to anyone who may have gotten tired of hitting the snooze button..

We cheated, you and me, and someone noticed. I noticed you; someone else noticed me. It hurts us. That's not so bad. So many people cheat. Everywhere….

Sometimes it takes failure to figure out who you aren't..

My understanding is that you get to choose which of your thoughts to go with..

Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die..