“A true friend honors and encourages our best self, and they will work at aaving us from self destruction, even if that means being difficult.”

“Now writing is just working your way toward the border that the innermost secret draws around itself, and to cross that line would mean self-destruction. But writing is also an attempt to respect the borderline only for the truly innermost secret, and bit by bit to free the taboos around that core, difficult to admit as they are, from their prison of unspeakability. Not self-destruction but self-redemption. Not being afraid of unavoidable suffering.”

“When we don’t put the brakes on our self-absorption, we have nothing stopping us from total self-destruction. We become the fruits of our actions.”

“The challenge life presents to each of us is to become truly ourselves--not the self we have imagined or fantasized about, not the self that our friends want us to be, not the self our ego would have us be, but the self God has ordained us to be from before we were in our mother's womb.”

“Sin so contaminates every area of our being that deeds done in religious service are tainted with self-love, self-seeking, self-worship...Not only do our evil deeds comdemn us, even our moral deeds damn us.”

“Sometimes the best offense was avoiding self-destruction.”