“For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you.”

“People help you, or you help them, and when we offer or receive help, we take in each other. And then we are saved”

“Joy is the best makeup. But a little lipstick is a close runner-up.”

“Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: You don’t give up.”

“To love yourself as you are is a miracle, and to seek yourself is to have found yourself, for now. And now is all we have, and love is who we are.”

“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.”

“We begin to find and become ourselves when we notice how we are already found, already truly, entirely, wildly, messily, marvelously who we were born to be.”

“Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns.”

“People help you, or you help them, and when we offer or receive help, we take in each other. And then we are saved.”