Quotes from young wm paul

My dad was a preacher. My relationship, for example, with my father -- very difficult, and very painful, and it took me 50 years to wipe the face of my father off the face of God.

The world has no meaning apart from relationships. Some are just messier than others, some are seasonal, others are difficult, and a few are easy, but every one of them is important.

You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but a the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you.

Emotions are the colors of the soul.

I think my books give people a language to have a conversation about God that's not religious. There isn't enough new literature that brings the conversation of God into a modern context. I love the Bible, but in the West we've analyzed it until it fits into a structure of control. We need more new stories. We need different ways of looking at things, and I think it's coming.

Don't ever discount the wonder of your tears. They can be healing waters and a stream of joy. Sometimes they are the best words the heart can speak.

I'm not an actual author but an accidental one.

Pain has a way of clipping our wings and keeping us from being able to fly ... and if left unresolved for very long, you can almost forget that you were ever created to fly in the first place.

Forgiveness is not about forgetting. It is about letting go of another person's throat.

I'm trying to get far away from [picturing God as] Gandalf or Santa Claus.

Emotions talked to you before you had words, so listen to them ... they are often more honest than the mind's remarkable ability to self deceive.

The enemy of a writer is not controversy but obscurity.

Sometimes honesty can be incredibly messy.

City and country -- each has its own beauty and its own pain. Some of the smallness of small towns -- cattiness, everybody knowing everybody's business -- that can be challenging. And cities can be challenging, because no one can connect except electronically.

Authority, as you usually think of it, is merely the excuse the strong use to make others conform to what they want.

I make a distinction between true and real. I think that the story is true, it's just not real. That's what a parable is. It takes things that we all know are real, and it takes life events that actually happen, and it weaves them into a fiction that allows truth to actually be embedded.

Words you will never hear God say, "I did my part ... now it's all up to you."

I'm not too big on religion ... and not very fond of politics or economics either ... And why should I be? They are the man-created trinity of terrors that ravages the earth and deceives those I care about. What mental turmoil and anxiety does any human face that is not related to one of those three?

Something in the heart of most human beings simply cannot abide pain inflicted on the innocent, especially children. Even broken men serving in the worst correctional facilities will often first take out their own rage on those who have caused suffering to children. Even in such a world of relative morality, causing harm to a child is still considered absolutely wrong. Period!

In some sense every parent does love their children. But some parents are too broken to love them well.