“Listen to your dialogue. Look at your thoughts. Be horrified. Be grateful that God loves characters, and loves characters on journeys, characters honestly striving to grow. If someone else was delivering your lines, would you like them? If someone else was wearing your attitude, would you be impressed?”

Probabilities: they are prophets of a mechanical god.

“Tree, God says, and there is one. But he doesn’t say the word tree; He says the tree itself. He’s not merely calling one into existence, though his voice creates. His voice is existence.”

“My father uses a blue highlighter to remind him of the good bits he reads, but it has trouble sticking to sunsets or thunderstorms or the cries of the meadowlark in the spring. His guitar is more helpful.”

“There is a crushing joy that crackles in every corner of this world. I am tiny and yet I am here. I have been given senses, awareness, existence, and placed on a stage so crowded with the cast, so teeming with the tiny, that I can do nothing but laugh, and sometimes laugh and cry. Living makes dying worth it.”

“What is art? Art is.”

“What is the world? His art. It is the best of all possible art, a finite picture of the infinite. … This painting is by an infinite Artist. It is a reflection of Himself.”

“I am here to live my story, to love my story. I will not fail to savor any gift out of a desire for self-preservation.”