Dogs, lives are short, too short, but you know that going in. You know the pain is coming, you’re going to lose a dog, and there’s going to be great anguish, so you live fully...

…an age-old patter that seemed like chaos but was not…

You can con God and get away with it, Granny said, if you do so with charm and wit. If you live your life with imagination and verve, God will play along just to see...

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In his mind he saw them standing with the tips of their organs pressed together ejaculating into each other’s penis.

To get through life successfully, body and soul must translate each other correctly more often than not.

Most people desperately desire to believe that they are a part of a great mystery, that Creation is a work of grace and glory, not merely the result of random forces colliding. Yet each time...

…because wonder admits to the existence of mystery, and the recognition of mystery in the world allows the possibility of Truth.

I can explain why I have to do what I’m about to do, but I’m acutely aware that an explanation is not a righteous justification. What’s bad is bad even if necessary.

Even as a child, she had preferred night to day, had enjoyed sitting out in the yard after sunset, under the star-speckled sky listening to frogs and crickets. Darkness soothed. It softened the sharp edges...

Nothing is worse than being alone on the evening of the day when one’s cow has exploded.

The only thing I know for sure is how much I do not know.

The more you expect from life, the more your expectations will be fulfilled. By laughing, you do not use up your laughter, but increase your store of it. The more you love, the more you...

No matter how close we are to another person, few human relationships are as free from strife, disagreement, and frustration as is the relationship you have with a good dog. Few human beings give of...

Hope, love, and faith are in the waiting

She was fascinated with words. To her, words were things of beauty, each like a magical powder or potion that could be combined with other words to create powerful spells.

In even a clear heart, some righteous acts of the harder kind can stir up a sediment of guilt, but that is not a bad thing. If allowed to be, the heart is self-policing, and...

…it will be a world made not bright but brighter, not clean but cleaner.

Humanity is a parade of fools, and I am at the front of it, twirling a baton.

Virtue is imaginative. Evil, repetitive.

But with the morning almost gone, with seven bodachs in the recreation room, with living boneyards stalking the storm, with Death opening the door to a luge chute and inviting me to go for a...

Every journey has a destination, known or unknown.

I am learning my way toward something that will make sense of my life, and I learn by going where I have to go, with whatever companions I am graced.

I stopped in St. Bernadette’s Cemetery one of my favorite places… The trunks of six giant oaks rise like columns supporting a ceiling formed by their interlocking crowns. In the quiet space below, is laid...

You do what you have to do. That’s who you seem to be to me, anyway. You’re one who does what he has to do.

For the likes of you, the path to happiness is one mean son of a bitch of a path.

She has suffered so much, and that sorrows me. But she has been strong in the face of unthinkable adversity, and that inspires me.

Beauty that steals the heart is often imperfect, suggests grace and kindness, and inspires tenderness more than it incites lust.

Where does fiction end and reality begin?

In tragedy and despair, when an endless night seems to have fallen, hope can be found in the realization taht the companion of night is not another night, that the companion of night is day,...

In August of 1998, I completed Seize the Night, the sequel to my novel Fear Nothing, one of many of my books in which a dog is among the cast of principal characters. Every time...

There is no fate, only free will, and we were just in the way of other people’s free will when they decided to do the Devil’s work.

A grace is a thing you get from God, you use it to make a better world, or not use it, you have to choose.

The sky is deep, the sky is dark. The light of the stars is o damn stark/When I look up, I fill with fear, if all we have is what lies here, this lonely world,...

One of the greatest gifts we receive from dogs is the tenderness they evoke in us. The disappointments of life, the injustices, the battering events that are beyond our control, and the betrayals we endure,...

…love was the closest thing to immortality that men would ever know and that the only–and best–answer to death is loving. Loving.

Of course, in the process, you must never do harm to others in any serious way, or you’ll cease to amuse Him. Then payment comes due for promises you didn’t keep.

What we fear too much we often bring to pass.

A high degree of intelligence yes in no other creature in the natural world. That’s why nature shuns us and why we subconsciously hate her and seek to obliterate her. High intelligence leads to the...

He lives vividly in her recollections, however, and his memory is etched on her soul.

If one’s friends do not openly laugh at him, they are not in fact his friends.

Darkness dwells within even the best of us. In the worst of us, darkness not only dwells but reins.

To protect the innocent, to avoid being one of Burke’s good men who do nothing, you have to accept permanent scars that cincture the heart and traumas of the mind that occasionally reopen to weep...

Darkness doesn’t fall at a predictable schedule. Darkness can overwhelm you any time of the day, as you know well.

On those occasions when he had killed in the dark, he later needed to see his victims’ faces because, in some unlit corner of his heart, he half expected to find his own face looking...

Duty doesn’t need to call; it only needs to whisper. And if you heed the call, no matter what happens, you have no need for regret.” Odd Thomas

Talking about a problem sometimes makes it worse.

When we make our own misery we sometimes cling to it even when we want so bad to change, because misery is something we know. The misery is comfortable.

I never plan for the future but wander into it with a smile on my face, hope in my heart, and the hair up on the nape of my neck.

Winny didn’t know what he would do without his books, except probably go berserk and start killing people and making ashtrays out of their skulls even though he didn’t smoke and never would.