24 Quotes by Nancy Mairs

God is no White Knight who charges into the world to pluck us like distressed damsels from the jaws of dragons, or diseases. God chooses to become present to and through us. It is up to us to rescue one another.

One of the blessings that comes with parental territory is that children tug you into experiences you’re pretty sure you’d never otherwise contemplate.

Poor and afflicted and oppressed people have faces, and we are required to look squarely into them. We can’t love what we won’t experience.

Who one believes God to be is most accurately revealed not in any credo but in the way one speaks to God when no one else is listening.

If the very thought of taking off all your clothes in the middle of the Washington Mall during a school holiday makes you blush, you haven’t even begun to dream what it feels like to publish a book.

Writing is not, alas, like riding a bicycle: it does not get easier with practice.

That’s the trouble with honorable mentions: they let everyone know you applied and didn’t win.

From the moment of birth, at every level, human beings who are more alike than different become polarized into two absolutely exclusive classes with very different and ill-distributed symbolic powers.

Do others, I wondered, “see things as I do? I do not think so, for if they did they would not still be alive.” And, life-threatening though my vision seemed, I would not repudiate it: “Sometimes I think I shall die from being different even as I cling to the difference fiercely.”