Last night, I finished Barbara Brown Taylor’s new book, which I found very thought-provoking.

Here are a few of my favorite passages:

[W]hen, despite all my best efforts, the lights have gone off in my life (literally or figuratively, take your pick), plunging me into the kind of darkness that turns my knees to water, nonetheless I have not died. The monsters have not dragged me out of bed and taken me back to their lair. The witches have not turned me into a bat. Instead, I have learned things in the dark that I could never have learned in the light, things that have saved my life over and over again, so that there is really only one logical conclusion. I need darkness as much as I need light. (5)

Most of the books on the New York Times “How-To” bestseller list are about how to avoid various kinds of darkness. (5)

I learned that sadness does not sink a person; it is the energy a person spends trying to avoid sadness that does that. (80)

After years of being taught that the way to deal with painful emotions is to get rid of them, it can take a lot of reschooling to learn to sit with them instead, finding out from those who feel them what they have learned by sleeping in the wilderness that those who sleep in comfortable houses may never know. (86)