"If you dont love somebody, it gets annoying if they tell you what to do or what to feel. When you love them, you get pleasure from their pleasure nad it makes it easy to serve. I didnt love God because i didnt know God. universe is not effected by time. Light exists outside of time.. It is still a mystery to physicists."

"Today I wonder why it is God refers to Himself as 'Father' at all. This, to me, in light of the earthly representation of the role, seems a marketing mistake."

"Paul was terribly personal. The books I like are the ones that make you feel like you are with a person who is being quite vulnerable, telling you all sorts of stuff that is personal, and that's the thing Paul did that makes me like him."

"He thought about the story his daughter was living and the role she was playing inside that story. He realized he hadn't provided a better role for his daughter. He hadn't mapped out a story for his family. And so his daughter had chosen another story, a story in which she was wanted, even if she was only being used. In the absence of a family story, she'd chosen a story in which there was risk and adventure, rebellion and independence."

"I've never walked out of a meaningless movie thinking ALL movies are meaningless. I only thought the movie I walked out on was meaningless. I wonder, then, if when people say life is meaningless, what they really mean is THEIR lives are meaningless."

"I wondered about the story we were writing and wanted even more to write a better story for myself, something that leaves a beautiful feeling even as the credits roll."

"Christian spirituality was not a children's story. It wasn't cute or neat. It was mystical and odd and clean, and it was reaching into dirty. There was wonder in it and enchantment."

"I think if you like somebody you have to tell them. It might be embarrassing to say it, but you will never regret stepping up. I know from personal experience, however, that you should not keep telling a girl that you like her after she tells you she isn't into it. You should not keep riding your bike by her house either."

"The separation of truth from reason is a dangerous game. I think ideas have to sink very deeply into a person's soul, into their being, before they can effect change."

"I was starting to believe I was a character in a greater story, which is why the elements of story made sense in the first place."

"Sometimes when I watch my dog, I think about how good life can be, if we only lose ourselves in our stories. Lucy doesn't read self-help books about how to be a dog; she just IS a dog. All she wants to do is chase ducks and sticks and do other things that make both her and me happy. It makes me wonder if that was the intention for man, to chase sticks and ducks, to name animals, to create families, and to keep looking back at God to feed off his pleasure at our pleasure."

"I will love you like God, because of God, mighted by the power of God. I will stop expecting your love, demanding your love, trading for your love, gaming for your love. I will simply love. I am giving myself to you, and tomorrow I will do it again. I suppose the clock itself will wear thin its time before I am ended at this altar of dying and dying again. God risked Himself on me. I will risk myself on you. And together, we will learn to love, and perhaps then, and only then, understand this gravity that drew Him, unto us."

"I know, from the three visits I made to him, the blended composite of love and fear that exists only in a boy's notion of his father."

"Author Toni Morrison swats aside other possible sources of her success and says that the ONLY reason she is a great writer is because when she walked into a room as a child her father's face lit up."

"The actual language of life is not the charts and graphs and stuff we map out to feel smart. The hidden language we are speaking is really about negotiating the feeling God used to give us."

"It occurs to me it is not so much the aim of the devil to lure me with evil as it is to preoccupy me with the meaningless."

"If you think about it, we get robbed of the mystery of being alive. I think we get robbed of the glory of it because we don't remember how we got here. When you get born, you wake up slowly to everything. From birth to 26, God is slowly turning on the lights, and you are groggy and pointing at things, and say 'Circle,' and, 'Blue,', and, 'Car,' and, 'Sex,' and then, 'Job,' and, 'Healthcare'. The experience is so slow, you could easily come to believe life isn't that big of a deal, that life isn't staggering. Life IS staggering, and we are just too used to it."

"Jesus had no regard for the lifeboat politics you and I live within every day."

"Because it is so scatterbrained and has absolutely no charts and graphs, I'm actually quite surprised the Bible sells."

"When you live countless stories in which you play a sedentary role, it's an odd feeling to switch stories."

"If the point of life is the same as the point of a story, the point of life is character transformation. If I got any comfort as I set out on my first story, it was that in nearly every story, the protagonist is transformed. He's a jerk at the beginning and nice at the end, or a coward at the beginning and brave at the end. If the character doesn't change, the story hasn't happened yet. And if story is derived from real life, if story is just condensed version of life then life itself may be designed to change us so that we evolve from one kind of person to another."

"The inciting incident is how you get (characters) to do something. It's the doorway through which they can't return, you know. The story takes care of the rest."

"I lay there under the stars and thought of what a great responsibility it is to be human."

"Meaning is something we experience more than we attain. It's like finding a nice, easy current in a river that carries you through life."

"And if these mountains had eyes, they would wake to find two strangers in their fences, standing in admiration as a breathing red pours its tinge upon earth's shore. These mountains, which have seen untold sunrises, long to thunder praise but stand reverent, silent so that man's weak praise should be given God's attention."

"I liked this God very much because you hardly had to talk to it and it never talked back. Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality."

"(The monks) approach was far less narcissistic and our tends to be. Their goal when reading Scripture was to see Christ in every verse, and not a mirror image of themselves."

"Sunday morning church service is not an enormous priority spending time with other believers is."

"The root systems of these lies we tell ourselves tend to grow together. It's all connected with the belief human love is conditional. But human love isn't conditional. No love is conditional. If love is conditional, it's just some sort of manipulation masquerading as love."

"The problem is this: those of us who are never satisfied with our accomplishments secretly believe nobody will love us unless we're perfect."

"It comforts me to think that if we are created beings the thing that created us would have to be greater than us, so much greater, in fact, that we would not be able to understand it. It would have to be greater than the facts of our reality and so it would seem to us, looking out from within our reality that it would contradict reason. But reason itself would suggest it would have to be greater than reality or it would not be reasonable."

"Anybody who wants to get their way says that Jesus supports their view. But that isn't Jesus' fault."

"You don't realize your story is changing you until you look back."

"All this beauty exists so you and I can see His glory, His artwork. It's like an invitation to worship Him, to know Him."

"I'm perfectly willing to be perfectly human."

"All relationships are teleological, are going somewhere."

"Life is a dance toward God, I began to think. And the dance is not so graceful as we might want. While we glide and swing out practiced sway, God crowds our feet, bumps our toes, and scuffs our shoes. So we learn to dance with the One who made us. And it is a difficult dance to learn, because its steps are foreign."

"The repentance we are called to is about choosing one audience over another."

"The mountains themselves call us into greater stories."

"I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn't resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes.After that I liked jazz music.Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way.I used to not like God because God didn't resolve. But that was before any of this happened."

"If the Gospel of Jesus is relational, that is, if our brokenness will be fixed not by our understanding of theology but by God telling us who we are, then this would require a kind of intimacy of which only Heaven knows."

"But love doesn't control, and I suppose that's why it's the ultimate risk. In the end, we have to hope the person we're giving our heart to won't break it, and be willing to forgive them when they do, even as they will forgive us. Real love stories don't have dictators, they have participants. Love is an ever-changing, complicated, choose-your-own adventure narrative that offers the world but guarantees nothing. When you climb a mountain or sail an ocean, you're rewarded for staying in control. Perhaps that's another reason true intimacy is so frightening. It's the one thing we all want, and must give up control to get."

"I asked God to help me understand the story of the forest and what it means to be a tree in that story."

"The words alone, lonely, and loneliness are three of the most powerful words in the English languagethose words say that we are human; they are like the words hunger and thirst. But they are not words about the body, they are words about the soul."

"I fell in love with books. Some people find beauty in music, some in painting, some in landscape, but I find it in words. By beauty, I mean the feeling you have suddenly glimpsed another world, or looked into a portal that reveals a kind of magic or romance out of which the world has been constructed, a feeling there is something more than the mundane, and a reason for our plodding."

"We live in a world where bad stories are told, stories that teach us life doesn't mean anything and that humanity has no great purpose. It's a good calling, then, to speak a better story. How brightly a better story shines. How easily the world looks to it in wonder. How grateful we are to hear these stories, and how happy it makes us to repeat them."

"Everybody wants to be somebody fancy. Even if they're shy."

"We don't know how much we are capable of loving until the people we love are being taken away, until a beautiful story is ending."

"It wasn't necessary to win for the story to be great, it was only necessary to sacrifice everything."

"What good does it do to tell somebody to live morally so they can die 50 years later and apparently go to Hell?"