"If we are a people who pray, darkness is apt to be a lot of what our prayers are about. If we are people who do not pray, it is apt to be darkness in one form or another that has stopped our mouths."

"You have to suffer in order to be beautiful."

"... the preacher speaks both the word of tragedy and the word of comedy because they are both of them the truth and because Jesus speaks them both..."

"Who can say when or how it will be that something easters up out of the dimness to remind us of a time before we were born and after we will die?"

"O thou who art the sparrow's friend," he said, "have mercy on this world that knows not even when it sins. O holy dove, descend and roost on Godric here so that a heart may hatch in him at last. Amen"

"To confess your sins to God is not to tell God anything God doesn't already know. Until you confess them, however, they are the abyss between you. When you confess them, they become the Golden Gate Bridge."

"So ever and again young Godric’s dreams well up to flood old Godric’s prayers, or prayers and dreams reach God in such a snarl he has to comb the tangle out, and who knows which he counts more dear."

"Once we have seen Him in a stable, we can never be sure where He will appear or to what lengths he will go or to what ludicrous depths of self-humiliation He will descend in His wild pursuit of men."

"The place God calls us to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet."

"With words as valueless as poker chips, we play games whose object it is to keep us from seeing each other's cards."

"It was not so much that a door opened as that I suddenly found that a door had been open all along which I had only just then stumbled upon."

"One of the blunders religious people are particularly fond of making is the attempt to be more spiritual than God."

"When Jesus said, “Do this in remembrance of me” (1 Corinthians 11:24) he was not prescribing a periodic slug of nostalgia."

"This side of Nirvana, there is no such escape for any of us as far as I know."

"Vocation is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet."

"It is out of the absence of God that God makes himself present,"

"It is more than just memory, I think, that binds us to the past. The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around..."

"I hold my plush monkey over the bannister and let it drop. Its eyes light up when you squeeze its kidneys as whose eyes, I suppose, would not."

"Because it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity, as I have long believed and often said, that God makes himself known"

"We are in constant danger of being not actors in the drama of our own lives but reactors."

"The real turning point in human history is less apt to be the day the wheel is invented or Rome falls than the day a boy is born to a couple of hick Jews."

"Life without death has become as unthinkable to me as day without night or waking without sleep."

"I find I need to put things into words before I can believe that they are entirely real."