But I'm afraid I'm bad at comforting; I can listen all right, but I can hardly ever find anything to say.

The diverse individuals in the community are no longer incentives for talking and judging and condemning, and thus excuses for self-justification. They are rather cause for rejoicing in one another and serving one another.

To bear the burden of the other person means involvement with the created reality of the other, to accept and affirm it, and, in bearing with it, to break through to the point where we take joy ink.

I think we honour God more if we gratefully accept the life that he gives us with all its blessings, loving it and drinking it to the full, and also grieving deeply and sincerely when we have impaired or wasted any of the good things of life (some people denounce such an attitude, and think it is bourgeois, weak, and sensitive), than if we are insensitive to life's blessings and may therefore also be insensitive to pain.

Nothing that we despise in other men is inherently absent from ourselves. We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or don't do, and more in light of what they suffer.

I'm not happy all the time, and I wouldn't want to be because that would make me a shallow person. But I do try to find the good in everybody.

Yet many times I felt terribly alone and was convinced that no one else understood. And I still think that's true. When our pain becomes intense and endures for weeks without relief, no one else really knows. I'm not sure it's worthwhile for them to know what it's like. They care. That's what I think is important.

Our life is...a time in which sadness and joy kiss each other at every moment.

In our own woundedness, we can become sources of life for others.

Anybody who's ever gone through a hard time - any outsider's perception, no matter how much information they're given, they have no idea what the person's life is like.

The Christian life is not about finding safety and comfort; it's about finding yourself in a dangerous place of vulnerable compassion.

There is no cross, big or small, in our life which the Lord does not share with us.