“Perhaps there really is a good that exists; for a century of darkness to be eschewed by a single flame; for a decade of evil done to the heart to be undone by simple and unplanned acts of kindness! There must be a goodness, after all! But we don't find it when we're looking for it; not in church, not in a cathedral, not even in our own homes! We find it when we've fallen down so hard, are downtrodden so low; and there is one true friend who picks us up; or one random person who takes us in! And we realize goodness was never in the places we thought it was! It was all along in the most humble of places: bound up in the heart of a true friend.”

“A true friend is someone who is always there for you, with no agenda other than the friendship itself. We rely on our friends to lift us up in bad times, to keep us grounded in good times, but most importantly, to be there for us when we need nothing at all.”

“We should always have three friends in our lives-one who walks ahead who we look up to and follow; one who walks beside us, who is with us every step of our journey; and then, one who we reach back for and bring along after we've cleared the way.”

“I do think there is evil. But it is very rare. It is as rare as true goodness. And just as true goodness produces rare saints, true evil produces rare monsters. The rest of us are semi-good, semi-bad, and we live our lives in a kind of half-happy, half-sad daze. We might hope that one sunny morning we find ourselves in the presence of a saint. And we must pray that we do not encounter the monster.”

“We're meant to stay connected to our hearts, you see. Feeling our feelings, present in the moments we're given. But we don't do that. And that's when we get in trouble. ...We mature and take responsibility for ourselves and others, and that's a good thing. But we're never meant to lose that alive quality, to get cut off from our true hearts. Growing up isn't the same thing as shutting down. ...We can fight it. We have to fight it. Because when our hearts shut down, we become mere shells of who we once were. We don't laugh—not honestly, not from the heart. We don't dream. We don't feel our feelings or use our gifts. We end up trying to just survive instead of live. It's like we've handed our hearts over to the enemy of our souls and said, 'Here you can have it. I'm giving up.”

“Those who find no humor in faith are probably those who find the church a refuge for their own black way of looking at life, although I think many of us find the church a refuge for a lot of our personality faults. Those of us, for example, who never learned to dance feel that the church is an ideal place for us if we can find a church that doesn't believe in dancing. Then we can get away with never having learned how to dance. You can carry this in all sorts of directions and see that the church is a refuge for what is really a 'flaw' in your own makeup.”