“Phyllis and I pray these chaplets together; at three o'clock, every first Saturday. We are never in the same town. For months, we do not speak on the phone or email. We pray these chaplets for just...”

“A few days before the confirmation service, she told her fatherthe pastor of the churchthat she wasn't sure she could go through with it. She didn't know that she really believed everything she was...”

“On any given morning, I might not be able to list for you the facts I know about God. But I can tell you what I wish to commit myself to, what I want for the foundation of my life, how I want to se...”

“... I am not the author of my prayers; when they come, they come from God.”

“Sometimes I cannot say much about why I go to church other than what people who go to the gym say: I always feel better once I'm there; I feel better after; it is always good for me, not good in a ...”

“Ellie tells me, often, some variation on this theme: that I am a little too invested in how I'm feeling about church and God, and perhaps not invested enough in how I am serving church, God, neighbor.”

“In every marriage more than a week old, there are grounds for divorce. The trick is to find and continue to find grounds for marriage.”

“You don't know when you're twenty-three.You don't know what it really means to crawl into someone else's life and stay there. You can't see all the ways you're going to get tangled, how you're goin...”

“Even the jerks earn some of our affection. We can be glad they're gone and yet still mourn the good parts.”

“A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.”

“I've always said that idleness dulls the spirit. We have to keep the brain busy, or at least the hands if we don't have a brain.”

“If your workplace was somehow transplanted into the jungle and everyone was forced to survive at a very primitive level, it's safe to say that eventually your boss would rape you.”