"But playing your music as loud as you want and coming home drunk aren't real life. Real life, it turns out, is diapers and lawnmowers, decks that need painting, a wife that needs to be listened to, kids that need to be taught right from wrong, a checkbook, an oil change, a sunset behind a mountain, laughter at a kitchen table, too much wine, a chipped tooth, and a screaming child."

"A story is based on what people think is important, so when we live a story, we are telling people around us what we think is important."

"I listened so hard because it felt like, while she was telling me stories, she was massaging my soul, letting me know that I was not alone, that I will never have to be alone, that there are friends and family and churches and coffee shops. I was not going to be cast into space."

"For a long time, I thought I was good at relationships because I was charming."

"I once listened to an Indian on television say that God was in the wind and the water, and I wondered at how beautiful that was because it meant you could swim in Him or have Him brush your face in a breeze."

"God allows us to face the tension whether we like it or not."

"I think this is when most people give up on their stories. They come out of college wanting to change the world, wanting to get married, wanting to have kids and change the way people buy office supplies. But they get into the middle and discover it was harder than they thought. They can't see the distant shore anymore, and they wonder if their paddling is moving them forward. None of the trees behind them are getting smaller and none of the trees ahead are getting bigger. They take it out on their spouses, and they go looking for an easier story."

"You get a feeling when you look back on life that all God really wants from us is to live inside a body He made, and enjoy the story, and to bond with Him through the experience."

"At the time, I didn't know what forgiveness meant. I wouldn't really know what forgiveness meant for another year, until my pastor, Rick McKinley, happened to spell it out in a sermon. He said that when you forgive, you bear the burden somebody has given you without holding them accountable."

"I learned that true love turns the other cheek, does not take a wrong into account, loves all people regardless of their indifference or hostility."

"It is always the simple things that change our lives. And these things never happen when you are looking for them to happen. Life will reveal answers at the pace life wishes to do so. You feel like running, but life is on a stroll. This is how God does things."

"A person could read the Bible, not to become smart, but rather to feel that they are not alone, that somebody understands them and love them enough to speak to them, on purpose, in a way that makes a person feel human."

"All our time spent making lists would be better spent painting, or writing, Or singing, or learning to speak stories. Sometimes I feel as though the Church has a kind of pity for Scripture, Always having to come behind it and explain everything, put everything into actionable steps, acronyms and hidden secrets, as though the original writers, and for that matter the Holy Spirit Who worked in the lives of the original writers, were a bunch of you literate hillbillies. I think the methodology God used to explain His Truth is quite superior. My life is a story, more than a list. I don't feel that a list could ever explain the complexity of all this beauty."

"I can no more understand the totality of God than the pancake I made for breakfast understands the complexity of me."

"Sometimes the things we want most in life are the things that will kill us."

"When I walked into the Christian section of a bookstore, the message was clear: Faith is something you do alone. Rick does not have much tolerance for people living alone. He's like Bill Clinton in that he feels everyone's pain. If Rick thinks somebody is lonely, he can't sleep at night. He wants us all to live with each other and play nice so he can get some rest. Tortured soul."

"You'd think God would come right out and tell us what to do in the Bible, but He doesn't. He mostly tells stories, and He rarely stops the story to say what the point is. He just lets the characters and conflict hang in the air like smoke."

"About the time I told God that He didn't exist, I was desperate for an identity."

"Life isn't memorable enough to remember everything. It's not like there are explosions all the time, or dog smoking cigarettes."

"When one of my friends becomes a Christian, which happens about every 10 years because I am a sheep about sharing my faith, the experience is euphoric. I see in their eyes the trueness of the story."

"When you build a city near no mountains and no ocean, you get materialism and traditional religion. People have too much time and lack inspiration."

"Burying themselves in his arm was more about feeling his love in the confusion, in the difficulty, than it was about having moved past it."

"More than a half million books, all of them smelling like dust and ink, two terrible smells that blend mystically to make something beautiful. Powells is another church to me, a paperback sort of heaven."

"Relationships unlock certain parts of who we are supposed to be."

"The downside of being a writer is you get plenty of time to overthink your life."

"Reality is like a fine wine, he said to me. 'It will not appeal to children."

"We were made to be distracted by life, by story."

"What if part of God's message to the world was you, the true and real you?"

"I don't wonder anymore what I'll tell God when I go to heaven when we sit in the chairs under the tree, outside the city........I'll tell these things to God, and he'll laugh, I think and he'll remind me of the parts I forgot, the parts that were his favorite. We'll sit and remember my story together, and then he'll stand and put his arms around me and say, 'well done,' and that he liked my story. And my soul won't be thirsty anymore. Finally he'll turn and we'll walk toward the city, a city he will have spoken into existence a city built in a place where once there'd been nothing."

"Just out of high school, you didn't realize you were creating drama for the sake of drama."

"I think that's why so many couples fight, because they want their partners to validate them and affirm them, and if they don't get that, they feel as though they're going to die. And so they lash out. But it's a terrible thing to wake up and realize the person you just finished crucifying wasn't Jesus."

"This message God was communicating to mankind, this Gospel of Jesus, was a message to the heart as much as to the head, that the methodology was as important as the message itself, that the message could not be presented accurately outside of the emotions within which these truths were embedded."

"Life has a peculiar feel when you look back on it that it doesn't have when you're actually living it. It's as though the whole thing were designed to be understood in hindsight, as though you'll never know the meaning of your experiences until you've had enough of them to provide reference."

"The human body essentially recreates itself every six months. Nearly every cell of hair and skin and bone dies and another is directed to its former place. You are not who you were last November."

"He captures memories because if he forgets them, it's as though they didn't happen."

"It was a haunting feeling, the sort of sensation you get when you wonder whether you are two people, the other of which does things you can't explain, bad and terrible things."

"In church, the rules of the lifeboat don't apply. Church is the refuge where the Kingdom of God is emulated, not mocked."

"Fear is a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life."

"The reason stories have dramatic tension is because LIFE has dramatic tension."

"Life no longer felt meaningless. It felt stressful and terrifying, but it definitely didn't feel meaningless."

"When you stop expecting people to be perfect, you like them for who they are. And when you stop expecting material possessions to complete you, you'd be surprised how much pleasure you get from material possessions. And when you stop expecting God to end all your troubles, you'd be surprised how much you like spending time with God."

"THE SEASONS REMIND ME THAT I MUST KEEP CHANGING."

"The trouble with deep belief is that it costs something And there is something inside me, some selfish beast of a subtle thing that doesn't like the truth at all because it carries responsibility, and if I actually believe these things I have to do something about them. It is so, so cumbersome to believe anything. And it isn't cool."

"Perhaps one of the reasons I've avoided standing on the point toward the horizon is the second you stand up and point toward a horizon, you realize how much there is to lose."

"A big part of me needed something outside myself to tell me who I was. The thing that had been designed to tell me who I was was gone."

"Every creative person, and I think probably every other person, faces resistance when they are trying to create something good...The harder the resistance, the more important the task must be."

"The same principles that make up a good story also make up a good life."

"To know there is a better story for your life and to choose something other is like choosing to die."

"The only appropriate war rhetoric is more rhetoric that calls our enemies spirits and people with flesh the victims of this war. Satan wants us to fight with one another, and I understand that some evil must be restrained, but our war, the war of the ones who believe in Jesus, is a war unseen. If we could muster a portion of the patriotism we feel toward our earthly nations into patriotism and bravery in concert with the kingdom of God, the enemy would take fewer casualties."

"All this gave way to my first encounter with guilt, which is still something entirely inscrutable to me, as if aliens were sending transmissions from another planet, telling me there is a right and a wrong in the universe."