“College is the best time of your life. When else are your parents going to spend several thousand dollars a year just for you to go to a strange town and get drunk every night?”

“I think when you become a parent you go from being a star in the movie of your own life to the supporting player in the movie of someone else's.”

“What are the best things and the worst things in your life, and when are you going to get around to whispering or shouting them?”

“But she wasn’t around, and that’s the thing when your parents die, you feel like instead of going in to every fight with backup, you are going into every fight alone.”

“I know there are people in this room who go to school every day and get treated like shit for no reason. Or you go home and you feel like you can’t tell your parents the whole truth about yourself. Beyond putting yourself in one box or another, you worry about the future. About college or work or even your physical safety. Trying to create that mental picture of your life—of what on earth is going to happen to you—can crush you a little bit every day. It is toxic and painful and deeply unfair.”

“There's not enough Scripture to be real dogmatic, but it appears that there's going to be a thousand-year span, coming after the end of this age, when if you're saved, you're going to get to live here for a thousand years. With everything fixed back to Garden-of-Eden conditions! Kids, you're going to get to have your own pet dinosaurs. That's going to be cool.”

“Because you have to just go with the flow. Your life is not your own, with people coming in and out all the time. You get mellow because you have to.”

“Did you know 75 percent of kids who go from Christian homes to public schools are going to lose their faith after one year of college? You parents better think long and hard before you send your kids off to school. Are you sending them off to a secular university so they could make more money in life? Is that your goal? You're willing to risk three fourths of them? I'd recommend at least one good year of Bible College before they go to a secular school, even if it's not accredited.”

“When things go wrong and will not come right,
Though you do the best you can,
When life looks black as the hour of night,
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.”

“There's life for you. Spend the best years of your life studying penmanship and rhetoric and syntax and Beowulf and George Eliot, and then somebody steals your pencil.”