Life is not a straight line leading from one blessing to the next and then finally to heaven. Life is a winding and troubled road. Switchback after switchback. And the point of biblical stories like Joseph and Job and Esther and Ruth is to help us feel in our bones (not just know in our heads) that God is for us in all these strange turns. God is not just showing up after the trouble and cleaning it up. He is plotting the course and managing the troubles with far-reaching purposes for our good and for the glory of Jesus Christ.

What if I'm in charge of my own damn light switch?

You can't turn love on and off like a light switch, no matter how hard you try. All you can do is wall it off, one brick at a time, until you've created an impenetrable fortress around your emotions. And once that fortress is built, you camouflage it so well that even you can't see it anymore.

Well, it seems to me that the best relationships - the ones that last - are frequently the ones that are rooted in friendship. You know, one day you look at the person and you see something more than you did the night before. Like a switch has been flicked somewhere. And the person who was just a friend is... suddenly the only person you can ever imagine yourself with.

Laughter is day and sobriety is night a smile is the twilight that hovers gently between both more bewitching than either.

Polygraph tests are 20th-century witchcraft.

I like 'Bewitched' off the first album because it's one of the happiest songs I've ever written and as any writer will tell you happy songs are a million times more difficult to write than sad songs.

People look up to me as somebody who is able to switch the image of our country from negative to positive.

Poetry operates by hints and dark suggestions. It is full of secrets and hidden formulae like a witch's brew.

The hippies wanted peace and love. We wanted Ferraris blondes and switchblades.

I like to comprehend more or less everything around me - apart from the creation of my music. It's an obsessive character trait that's getting worse. I don't switch the light on and off 15 times before I leave the room yet but something's going wrong.

Stone walls confine a tinker cold iron binds a witch but a musician's music can never be fettered for it lives first in her heart and mind.

The only problem is I can't get into PG-13 Land. I just get stuck in R rated movies which they would love us to make PG-13 movies but I never get there. But I think that you've got to make them different. You've got to switch them up.

I heard the Beatles and the Stones and Mom bought me an electric guitar. I played lead for four years and then switched to bass. One day someone suggested that I should sing so I sheepishly stepped up to the microphone and the rest is rock history.

It's hard either way at home or on the bus I think the hardest thing probably for me is going one second from being mom to right out on the stage and having to be that person too. It's hard to switch gears.

I went to Duke University in the medical track. And then I decided I wanted to do something more creative so I switched to biochemistry at Nebraska.

The growth of technology is such that it is not possible today for a nuclear physicist to switch into medical physics without training. The field is now much more technical. More training is needed to do the job.

In 1989 when I switched from Democrat to Republican with God as my witness not one thing changed about what I believed about one man and one woman in a marriage or about diversity of color. That's a good thing.

You know my first three or four drafts you can see are on legal pads in long hand. And then I go to a typewriter and I know everybody's switching to a computer. And I'm sort of laughed at.

Shakespeare also introduces the supernatural into some of his tragedies he introduces ghosts and witches who have supernatural knowledge.

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.

Here is everything which can lay hold of the eye ear and imagination - everything which can charm and bewitch the simple and ignorant. I wonder how Luther ever broke the spell.

Alaska is what happens when Willy Wonka and the witch from Hansel and Gretel elope buy a place together upstate renounce their sweet teeth and turn into health fanatics.

When I meet people who say - which they do all of the time - 'I must just tell you my great aunt had cancer of the elbow and the doctors gave her 10 seconds to live but last I heard she was climbing Mount Everest ' and so forth I switch off quite early.