GLENNON DOYLE MELTON

Sometimes when you love someone like a mother loves her child, that love can turn into fear. It happens to me all the time. I am so afraid that the world will not be kind to my children.

The truth is that cleaning up socks and trying to get someone to really listen to you is marriage. It's less sweep you off your feet and more sweep the kitchen four times a day. Like everything good in life, it's 98% back-breaking work and 2% moments that make the work worthwhile.

We should live out our particular brand of faith, sure - but we should never force our brand of faith upon anyone else. All violence starts with the desire to change others and then never, ever ends.

Parenting is the most important thing to many of us, and so it's also the place we're most vulnerable. We're all a little afraid we're doing it wrong.

I snap at people I love all the time, and that makes me feel bad about myself. I want to be Zen. I am so not Zen. Whatever Zen is, I'm the opposite of it.

We'd better not speak against misogyny if, in the same breath, we're not also speaking against transphobia and homophobia and racism and classism and poverty. This is one fight. It always has been.

When we shrug and say we don't care, it's usually a lie. Every girl cares. We've just been taught not to expose ourselves by showing it. What the world needs now is girls and women who aren't afraid to care - who are done saying, 'Whatever.'

If no pain, then no love. If no darkness, no light. If no risk, then no reward. It's all or nothing. In this damn world, it's all or nothing.

The most important thing on Earth is for all of us to make this sentence true: Compassion is what people do.

The Internet is neither good nor bad. It's neutral - it becomes for each of us exactly what we bring to it.

To me, full-time mothering felt like way too much and yet not nearly enough. Lost in a landslide of diapers, birthday parties, and others' needs, I ached to reestablish myself.

The Internet has become my enabler. It keeps me from stillness and discomfort, and this keeps me from growing.

Habits are learned. And children learn their habits by watching what we do, not by listening to what we say. So we have to stop talking and teaching and preaching and just go do.

I've seen my name on marquees and bowed to standing ovations. I've also been called a fraud, a mental case, a heretic. People all over the country wait in line to hug me or curse me.

I hated writing 'Love Warrior.' It's the hardest thing I've every written. I cried.

We can be shiny and perfect and admired, or we can be real and honest and vulnerable and loved. But we actually do have to choose.

We are all trained by Disney to believe that the wedding is the finish line, but the wedding is just another starting line. In light of this fact, we should quit the huge, fancy, debt-inducing weddings.

If grace isn't shocking and countercultural and scandalous and a little ridiculous, then it's not Grace.

A safe life includes following your dreams with the full knowledge that doing so is not, in any way, shape or form, safe in the traditional meaning of the word. Because living safely means dying without too many regrets. That is safe.

Pain is mandatory for all of us. It's what teaches us. Suffering is what's optional. That's what happens when we try to skip over the pain.

It makes no sense to me that my gay friends cannot get married to each other because a certain slice of Christianity doesn't believe in gay marriage.

Often, we need to ignore the words people say and attend to their underlying, urgent, life or death questions: Am I valuable? Am I loved? The great thing is that the answer is easy: Yes! The answer is always yes. We don't have to think too hard.

I wrote in my first book that I was broken, and now it just makes me mad every time. This is why writing words in books is so precarious. This is why Jesus only wrote in the sand, right? I just - I hate that I wrote that.

You need to remember that being rejected by church is not the same as being rejected by God. God did not kick you out of church, honey. The church kicked God out of church.

Rock bottom is a crisis... and everyone wants to avoid crisis. But what 'crisis' means literally is 'to sift' - like a child who goes to the beach, lifts up the sand, and watches all the sand fall away, hoping that there's treasure left over. That's what crisis does.