From Note to Self :
"And God must be a pretty big fan of 'today', because you keep waking up to it. You have made known your request for a hundred different yesterdays, but the sun keeps rising on this thing that has never been known. Yesterday is dead and over. Wrapped in grace. Those days are grace. You are still alive, and today is the most interesting day. Today is the best place to live."
From Ever Get Home :
"Rickey is here now, innocent and mature and inspiring in all of his appreciating. He reminds me of all of them. They are the coolest thing happening on the planet. That new baby Murphy will know so much love and laughter. And Joel's constant sharing, inspiring with his honesty. Kory always wrestling, always aware of the tension. Jorge's kind heart, humble and gold and I hope that we're the same. Griffin cool as shit, leading the change and smart and making people laugh. My dear friend Jon, leading all of them, always sneaking off at midnight, to the middle of Broadway, just him and God and the people stuck in moments. He goes to remember, to say his thousand thanks, to know his Father, to love his city. Someone told me once that New York City was like a person, and I suppose I understand that now. It is difficult to lose a person."
From I'm starting to believe the ocean is much like You :
"The building has always come easy - the creative, the words on napkins, the wild open doors. It's easy to always look ahead, to equate success with getting the hell away from where you started. If you're faster than whatever's chasing you, then you never have to pay attention to it. You tell yourself it's okay that the bridges burned. You didn't mean for it to happen, but maybe it's better - I mean, you're not going back, they can't go where you're going.
Or maybe those are lies. Maybe the constant motion is simply a man on the run, a man scared to death of standing still, a man scared to death of what he might find, or what might find him. And maybe the hero's dance is not the run across the burning bridge. Maybe the hero's dance is the pause and the turning to say 'This wasn't meant to burn.' Maybe the leader is the one who looks back and sees something worth fighting for."
From This Broken City :
"A couple in love is enjoying a picnic, a moment borrowed from some perfect movie. Nearby, a woman sits in heated conversation with herself, stuck in a moment, still reaching for something she lost years ago. My path divides them, and I can't shake either scene. I want to be the couple. I want the woman to be healed. I don't know the way to either place. My own heart is heavy. Head full of songs, I keep walking. "
From To Write Love on Her Arms. :
"She is full of contrast, more alive and closer to death than anyone I've known, like a Johnny Cash song or some theatre star. She owns attitude and humor beyond her 19 years, and when she tells me her story, she is humble and quiet and kind, shaped by the pain of a hundred lifetimes. I sit privileged but breaking as she shares. Her life has been so dark yet there is some soft hope in her words, and on consecutive evenings, I watch the prettiest girls in the room tell her that she's beautiful. I think it's God reminding her."
From To Whisper Against This. (Alive Inside the Astrodome) :
"Young men from New Orleans are doing calculus on cots, finding inspiration in strange new skies. Boys are being boys, moving perfectly from tackle football to toy soldiers on a small strip of turf. Old men laugh at this display of youth, while mothers braid hair and keep children close. One boy smiles bright and points to Payton Mannings autograph on his Jimi Hendrix t-shirt. The quarterback was here yesterday. Dr. Phil is here today. Bill Clinton and George Bush Sr. will be here tomorrow. There are reporters and men with cameras, soldiers and police, doctors and nurses. Men in suits move through, pitching religion while hundreds more live theirs quietly.
It is some stange slice of life, so many characters moving through, me among them. I am seeing so many things; poverty and laughter, rescue and pain. Hope is here too. They are a beautiful broken people. I forget that I am in Houston, as every conversation is New Orleans. I am tasting that famous blend of history and fantasy, music and mayhem, bright lights and darker things. Beneath banners of business and victory, inside a dome built for pleasure, I sit among ten thousand stories."
From Zeke Sanders: You Were Loved :
"i didn't know him well but this is what i knew:
Zeke Sanders was hilarious and kind, small and huge in the same moment. He was humility and rock star, fashion and fishing, alive and encouraging and broken and hopeful and a thousand other things i'll never know. He was simple and complex. He was my friend. Something hopeful in me says he knows now how much he was loved. We will miss his smile, his laughter, his kindness, his tiny jeans and enormous shoes, made for wrestling. We will miss him tomorrow night when we set up, Sunday when we tear down, and Monday morning at Ian's, when it's too quiet. i don't know what else to say. i just have to believe that we are all more loved than we'll ever know. And we're all in this together."
