“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. ”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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