If this was the best wine that Jim and Nora could afford or, worse, if this was their idea of a good wine – well, sadly, then they were better off dead.

That was the splendid thing about life: Though it was cruel, it was also mysterious, filled with wonder and surprise; sometimes the surprises were so amazing that they qualified as miraculous, and by witnessing those...

…he looked as if nothing hard in the world had touched him…

What will happen will happen. There is time for miracles until there is no more time, but time has no end.

Writing isn’t a source of pain. It’s psychic chemotherapy. It reduces your psychological tumors and relieves your pain.

In a book, even the real bastards can’t hurt you. And you can never loose a friend you make in a book. When you get to a sad part, no one’s there to see you...

Being a bad guy was easy, being a hero was hard.

There are silences and silences. No one of them is like another. There is the silence of grief in velvet-draped rooms of a plushly carpeted funeral parlor which is far different from the bleak and...

…guilt is deserved only when the effort to resist evil is never made.

Then the clarifying thing happens, and what you need to do, what you must do, is not a question, not demand more revelation than what is given, be quiet in the face of it, quiet...

So,” said the Russian, after regaining is composure, “the lesson of the model is that the universe——all its matter and forms of energy——arise out of thought.

…your life is yours to shape as you wish with free will…

I’m alive but I have no life. I’m alive but also dead. I’m dead and alive.

Fire, ice, asteroids and pole shifts are bogeymen with which we distract ourselves from the real threat of our time. In an age when everyone invents his own truth, there is no community, only factions....

You won’t find the truth of life in morbidity, only in hope.

On a small table beside his chair were other haphazardly stacked volumes by such poets as Emerson, Whitman, and Wallace Stevens, a dangerous crew to let into your head.

Do not doubt the beauty of your heart.

Evil itself may be relentless. I will grant you that, but love is relentless too. Friendship is a relentless force. Family is a relentless force. Faith is relentless force. The human spirit is relentless, and...

Most people regarded Psychology as a science. Some called it a soft science, but those making such a distinction grew fewer by the year.

My life has a mysterious purpose that I don’t understand, and day by day, conflict by conflict, I learn by going where I have to go.

These days, all I ask of Fate is that the people she hurls into my life, whether they are evil or good, or morally bipolar, should be amusing to one degree or another. This is...

He wondered why it was easier to believe in a malevolent spirit than in a benign one. Sometimes it seemed that the human heart, this side of Eden, feared eternal life more than death, light...

Three more words. Be happy. Persevere.

Although enlightened people know that an extreme phobia wasn’t a form of madness, hey could not help but regard it as odd.

None of us can ever save himself; we are the instruments of one another’s salvation, and only by the hope that we give to others do we lift ourselves out of the darkness into light.

The dead are merely the countrymen of my future.

I am the One, and I see all.But the blind man in Apartment 1-A is blind in many ways, as are all human beings, even those with functioning eyes. They are blind to their folly,...

Were you always such a snake,” the child asked, “or did you grow into what you are?

Years later, after other experiences with dogs, I wondered if their species were shaped and charmed to serve as four-legged guides able to assist in leading humanity back to our first—and lost—home. By the example...

It’s a world of sorrow, Oddie, because we make it so.

She would have thought that working and living in continuous happiness, harmony, and security day after day would lead to mental lethargy, that her writing would suffer from too much happiness, that she needed a...

There’s just something unsettling about studying your reflection. It’s not a matter of being dissatisfied with your face or of being embarrassed by your vanity. Maybe it’s that when you gaze into your own eyes,...

Now, sprawled comfortably in his motel bed, Anson Sharp enjoyed the sleep of the amoral, which is far deeper and more restful than the sleep of the just, the righteous, and the innocent.

When I woke up and the dark wasn’t gone yet, and the dark seemed so big, then she sang soft and made the dark small again.”That is the best of all things we can do...

Play hard. Play, play, play like your life depends on it. Because it does.

We’ve only been sitting here forty minutes. I’m never at the morning table less than an hour and a half. I do some of my finest plotting over breakfast coffee and raisin brioche.

I was looking forward to having a halo. It would make such a convenient reading lamp.

For a long time things were so bad. Very bad. Dark even when there was light.The only thing that kept the dark back was the Forever Shiny Thing that was her secret…It is a word…the...

That stormy day in the desert, however, much changed for me. We must have our goals, our dreams and we must strive for them. We are not gods, however; we do not have the power...

people have a natural tendency to anthropomorphize their pets, to ascribe human perceptions and intentions to the animal where none exist

Considering that the modern and contemporary literature taught in most universities is largely bleak, cynical, morbid, pessimistic, misanthropic dogmatism, often written by suicidal types who sooner or later kill themselves with alcohol or drugs, or...

And the ache is always there, but one day not the emptiness, because to nurture the emptiness, to take solace in it, is to disrespect the gift of life.

Evil never dies. It just changes faces.

Quantum theory tells us, Mr. Thomas, that every point in the universe is intimately connected to every other point, regardless of apparent distance. In some mysterious way, any point on a planet in a distant...

I am sustained by the certainty that life has meaning. As does death.

Intuition is seeing with the soul.

She was reduced to the dependency of an infant, too terrified of life itself to find solace anywhere but in the familiar succoring breast and in the sound of that same heartbeat remembered from the...

But with one exception, all things pass from this world and time erases not just memories but entire civilizations, reducing everyone and every monument to dust. The only that survives is love, for it is...

Truth is always stranger than fiction. We craft fiction to match our sense of how things ought to be, but truth cannot be crafted. Truth is, and truth has a way of astonishing us to...

…the more we learn, the more we realize how much we don’t know.