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.

Yet the human heart is disheartened by the most unreasonable self-judgments, because even when we take on giants, we too often confuse failure with fault, which I know too well. The only way back from...

…he was part of a family whether he wanted to be or not, the family of humanity, more often than not a frustrating and contentious clan, flawed and often deeply confused, but also periodically noble...

Recognizing the structure of your psychology doesn’t mean that you can easily rebuild it.

It’s only life. We all get through it.

In twenty-one years, I have not considered changing to Todd. The bizarre course of my life suggests that Odd is more suited to me, whether it was conferred by my parents with intention or fate.

Maybe the devil in human beings isn’t the reflection of the devil, perhaps the devil is only a reflection of the savagery and brutality of our kind. Maybe what we’ve done is create the devil...

Perseverance is impossible if we don’t permit ourselves to hope.

I feel like I’ve been sliding all day.

Even the wisest and the best of us can be foolish occasionally.

That is, Jack thought, the way of life. The horror changes us, because we can never forget. Cursed with memory. It starts when we’re old enough to know what death is and realize that sooner...

Acknowledge your fear, odd one. Fearlessness is for the insane and the arrogant. You are neither. Those who rely on you for their lives will be well served only if you fear what you should...

You are reformed, you may be a better man, but you are not a different man. How can you convince yourself of such a thing when you are so conversant with the theology of your...

And because we have been given thought, will, and imagination, albeit on a human scale, we too have this power to create.

Living in a monastery, even as a guest rather than a monk, you have more opportunities than you might have elsewhere to see the world as it is, instead of through the shadow that you...

Good fences make good neighbors, and these were apparently good enough that they had not felt the need for razor wire at the top. I crested the fence, threw myself into the yard beyond, fell,...

But the line between moral behavior and narcissistic self-righteousness is thin and difficult to discern

I am amazed that there are still nights when I sleep well.

Sometimes enlightenment descends upon you when you least expect it…

I’d prefer a free continental breakfast.

People existed, however, who believed that closet racist were everywhere around them. They needed to believe this in order to have prupose and meaning in their lives, and to have someone to hate.

When I function in only one mode or the other, I am denying half myself, half my potential.

Hope wasn’t a cottage industry; it was neither a product that she could manufacture like needlepoint samplers nor a substance she could secrete, in her cautious solitude, like a maple tree producing the essence of...

Then perhaps you shouldn’t sleep. The imagination has terrifying power.

Sleep is a kind of peace, and I have not yet earned peace.

Words are the wellspring of the world, and language is the most powerful weapon in the ancient and still unfolding war between truth and lies.

Her eyes were clear; she hadn’t been crying. She was a cop’s wife first, a woman second; she wouldn’t give in to tears as long as Wyatt was fighting for his life because she was...

We need to laugh at the irrationality of evil, for in doing so we deny evil’s power over us, diminish its influence in the world, and tarnish the allure it has for some people.

The uniqueness of every soul is not a theme that our current culture, obsessed with group identities, cares to assert.

From their perspective, however, torture might make a sort of cockeyed sense if it was ritualistic, part of a ceremony that this fraternity of the demented required of themselves when they murdered one of their...

This may be the primary purpose of dogs: to restore our sense of wonder and to help us maintain it, to make us consider that we should trust our intuition as they trust theirs and...

Our culture sentimentalizes children, and we forget one of the things that we should most remember from that time of our lives: Children know that this world can be hard on them, harder than it...

Ambition and stupidity are a dangerous combination.

Language can’t describe reality. Literature has no stable reference, no real meaning. Each reader’s interpretation is equally valid, more important than the author’s intention. In fact, nothing in life has meaning. Reality is subjective. Values...

Are you one of those people who uses words more for the sound than for the sense of them?

Every beautiful facade seemed to conceal rot and ruin that I could almost see.

But the more people we love and the more deeply we love them, the more vulnerable we are to loss and grief and loneliness.

Always, the eye sees more than the mind can comprehend, and we go through life self-blinded to much that lies before us. We want a simple world, but we live in a magnificently complex one,...

All death matters.””Only to the living.

You can change the road you take, but sometimes it can bend back to lead you straight to that same stubborn fate.

She is a girl who feels things strongly, and though cynics might mock her for that, I never will, as it is perhaps the best of graces: to feel deeply, to care profoundly.

Petting, scratching, and cuddling a dog could be as soothing to the mind and heart as deep meditation and almost as good for the soul as prayer.

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...