He would never need a knife to spread a pat of butter on his toast. That smile would quickly melt it.

I would die of lonely.

Being alone can be good. It’s easy to find peace alone. But sometimes, being alone is a king of death.

Anyone who learns the true and hidden nature of the world will be terrified, Oddie, but there’s a safe harbor past the terror.

I was the worst kind of fool. When I look back on that August night, changed forever by all my wounds and all my suffering, that undamaged Odd Thomas seems like a different human being from me, immeasurably more confident than I am now, still able to hope, but not as wise, and I mourn...

A sixth sense is a miraculous thing, which in itself suggests a supernatural order. The human intellect, however, for all its power and triumphs, is largely formed by this world and is therefore corruptible.

A broken thing can’t fix itself.

Too much mystery is merely an annoyance. Too much adventure is exhausting. And a little terror goes a long way.

Every day we make our way through a moral forest, along pathways ever branching. Often we get lost.When the array of paths before us is so perplexing that we can’t make a choice, or won’t, we can hope that we will be given a sign to guide us. A reliance on sighs, however, can lead...

I suspect she must speak without emotion or otherwise entirely lose the self-control that is required to speak to me at all.

Stay low, stay quiet, keep it simple, don’t expect too much, enjoy what you have.

Be you and only you, which means be you and all the people you have loved…

Her eyes were celadon saucers but bottomless, of such great depth that she could take in the knowledge of whole worlds and have room in that gaze for still more.

Denial couldn’t be maintained.

…hope and trust will more reliably keep a man afloat, while fear is more like to sink him.

Eventually he understood that he was crying for himself. He was ashamed of the man whom he had become, mourning the man whom he had expected to be when he’d been a boy.

If you’re still, and if you don’t hope too much, peace will come to you. It’s a grace. But you have to choose happiness.

We are all the walking wounded in a world that is a war zone. Everything we love will be taken from us, everything, last of all life itself. Yet everywhere I look, I find great beauty in this battlefield, and grace and the promise of joy.

Virtue is imaginative, evil repetitive.

Keep in mind the roots of violence: Lust, envy, anger, avarice, and vengeance…the taproot…the killer’s ultimate and truest motivation…is the hatred of truth…the hatred of truth is a vice. From it comes pride and an enthusiasm for disorder.

You’re a poster boy for sincerity. You have all the guile of a lamb.

To spare Cloyce’s victims further indignities to their memory, I must be a scourge. To prevent others from perhaps being infected by Cloyce’s depravity by watching him at work, I must be a scourge. To prevent time management technology from falling into the hands of authorities who, if not already corrupt, would be corrupted by...

This time I would choose to err on the side of illogic. I had to trust intuition, and plunge as I had never plunged before, with blind faith.

From birth to death we explore and seek, and in the end we arrive where we started, the past having made one great slow turn on a carousel to become our future, and if we have learned anything worth learning, the carousel will bring us to the one place we most need to be.

On the third, directly before me, were embedded more polished letters: PER OMNIA SAECULA SAECULORUM.For ever and ever. In the red light, the brushed steel glowed softly, like embers. The polish letters blazed.Without a hiss, For ever and ever slid aside, as though inviting me to eternity.

Fate isn’t one straight road…there are forks in it, many different routes to different ends. We have the free will to choose the path.

the divine has taken a few steps back from humankind, perhaps in revulsion, perhaps because we don’t deserve to look directly upon holy beings anymore…. When the divine enters the world these days from outside of time, it manifests discreetly through children and animals.

Money and beauty are defenses against the sorrows of this world but neither can undo the past. Only time will conquer time. The way forward is the only way back to innocence and to peace.

Appearances are not reality; but they often can be a convincing alternative to it. You can control appearances most of the time, but facts are what they are. When the facts are too sharp, you can craft a cheerful version of the situation and cover the facts the way that you can covered a battered...

Strange how the deepest part of us isn’t able to speak more clearly to the part of us that lives only here in the shallows of the world.

The dead can be even more frustrating to deal with than are many of the living, which is astonishing when you consider it’s the living who run the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Fate isn’t a straight road,” I said, becoming the oracle that earlier in the day I had declined to be for her. “There are forks in it, many different routes to different ends. We have the free will to choose the path.

Not immediately able to proceed, I stood there, inexpressibly grateful that my life, for all its terrors, is so filled with moments of grace.

I assure you the law isn’t a line engraved in marble, immovable and unchangeable through the centuries. Rather…the law is like a string, fixed at both ends but with a great deal of play in it-very loose, the line of the law-so you can stretch it this way or that, rearrange the arc of it...

Golden retrievers are not bred to be guard dogs, and considering the size of their hearts and their irrepressible joy in life, they are less likely to bite than to bark, less likely to bark than to lick a hand in greeting. In spite of their size, they think they are lap dogs, and in...

Mr. Thomas, any scientist will tell you that in nature many systems appear to be chaotic, but when you study them long enough and closely enough, strange order always underlies the appearance of chaos.

How obvious can it be? … The purpose of makeup is to defy the degradations of time, and time is just a synonym for death.

Be afraid in proportion to the threat.

I don’t desire a change of scenery or exotic experiences. My heart yearns for familiarity, stability, the comfort of home- and my sanity depends on it.

When men in power decide that things need to be rebalanced at any cost, the violence is never brief and never really directed solely at the imbalance that supposedly inspired it. The rule of law becomes the rule of violence. Revenge becomes a synonym for justice. No city is safe from such horror, no nation,...

My only armor is my belief that life has meaning…

In eighty-six years, child, I’ve learned the world is a far more mysterious place than most people realize and that every moment of life is woven through with meaning.

The line between moral behavior and narcissistic self-righteousness is thin and difficult to discern. The man who stands before a crowd and proclaims his intention to save the seas is convinced that he is superior to a man who merely picks up his own and other people’s litter on the beach, when in fact the...

In self-defense and in defense of the innocent, cowardice is the only sin.

There’s no tragedy in nature, only process — and therefore no triumph, either.

…because wherever else the future leads, it leads ultimately to death, the end that is present in my beginning and in yours.

…up to no good—and pleased about it.

Pico Mundo is a prosperous town. But no degree of prosperity can be sufficient to eliminate all misfortune, and sloth is impervious to opportunity.

Hope, love and faith are in the waiting.

If you’re going to keep the music in you, Jonah, you’ve got to play a little bit every day purely for pleasure. Otherwise, you’ll lose the joy of it, and if you lose the joy, you won’t sound good to those who know piano – or to yourself.