"I hike up hills and call them mountains. However, God descends to mountains and calls them stepping stones to heaven. And while the immensity of it all scares me a bit, I think I prefer God’s point of view."

"Seeing life as a gift is less the circumstances and more our attitude."

"If I don’t ‘see’ life as a gift I might be ‘seeing’ something, but it’s not life."

"What am I owed except the responsibility to see life as a gift?"

"True greatness does not arise from the achievements in my life. Rather, it is born out of an appreciation for my life."

"Sometimes in the thick quiet of those soft summer nights, I listen. For it is in the quiet that the voices of things deep and marvelous and adventurous whisper simply because a world of noise grants them no space. Therefore, if we have no quiet, we will hear plenty of noise, but we will not hear a single voice."

"I admire animals, for they don’t question life. Rather, they just live it. And on that rare occasion when I reach that enviable place, I realize that I’ve been living a ‘task’ rather than living a life."

"At the end, a journey based on my imagination will leave me imagining that I should have engaged the very thing I used my imagination to avoid."

"To pretend is to do nothing more than imagine life as something wonderful so that we don’t have to incur the pain that it takes to actually make life wonderful."

"I pretend to give gifts that people pretend to be gifts so that I can pretend that I gave something that actually cost me something. And what pretending or this sort gives me is the gift of a pretend life."