Terror and pleasure are linked in us. We are a baldly miswired species, Martie. Terror delights us, both the experience of terror and the dealing out of it to others. We are healthier if we...

Her stare was direct and unwavering, full of confidence earned from painful experience…

Life had been hard on this girl, Jacob, but she had enough courage for an army.

Maybe magic and love, together, can achieve what magic alone cannot.

Evil travels the world in anonymity, its presence revealed only by the periodic consequences of its desires…

We don’t have time for such uncertainty because it reliably breeds indecision, and indecision is one of the mothers of failure.

Chronologically she is twelve, but emotionally she is older, and intellectually older still.

Don’t you love your mother, dear?””I guess so. A hard, sharp, thorny kind of love that might be pity more than anything else.

Some people misunderstand evil and believe it will relent, and because their misplaced hope inspires dark hearts to dream darker dreams, they are the fathers and mothers of all wars. Evil does not relent; it...

People who were perfectly sane on Tuesday sometimes go nuts on Wednesday.

In this age, lies were the universal lubricant of the culture. A love of Truth and commitment to it were seldom rewarded and were often punished.

Hope lies in action

Ah, sir, that’s just mean. She’s not a Victoria’s Secret model, but she’s pretty in her way.

This isn’t a reasoned response to a configuration of stars, but the heart cannot flourish on logic alone. Unreason is an essential medicine as long as you don’t overdose

He’s a man,” Themla said.”I guess that explains it.””Hairy, Neanderthalic,” Thelma said, “perpetually half-crazed from excessive levels of testosterone, plagued by racial memories of the lost glory of mammoth-hunting expeditions – they’re all alike.

In spite of where we were, how we had gotten here and why we had come, I felt that at this moment of our lives, this place was exactly where we belonged. We were not...

Out of sight above the house, the mirror moon reflected the sun of a day not yet dawned, shining the pale light of tomorrow on the yard and on the paper birches.

As we passed his table, I saw that the device that imprisoned the book was clever but wicked-looking, as though the critic were holding the work – and it’s author – in bondage.

It’s funny, ma’am, how sometimes you’re so sarcastic but it doesn’t sting.””Because of my dimples. Dimples are a get-out-of-jail-free card

I had not asked to be born. Only to be loved.

Odd: I wish I could believe in reincarnation.Chief Porter: Not me. Once down the track is enough of a test. Pass me or fail me, Dear Lord, but don’t make me go through high school...

When you have dogs, you witness their uncomplaining acceptance of suffering, their bright desire to make the most of life in spite of the limitations of age and disease, their calm awareness of the approaching...

A fine line separates the weary recluse from the fearful hermit. Finer still is the line between hermit and bitter misanthrope.

What has been is no more. Change has come.

People scare me more than anything, for I know too well the savagery of which humankind is capable.

Even if there are moments during the day when all seems normal and when every action of your own and of those around you seems to be unremarkable, the appearance of ordinariness is an illusion,...

Translating the words on the door, he said, “Light from light.” “Waste and void, waste and void. Darkness on the face of the deep,” I said. “Then God commanded light. The light of the world...

I’d had much practice turning my mind away from certain memories of my childhood. I could quickly dial her remembered voice from a whisper to a silence.

Narcissists are everywhere in this ripe age of self-love, which amazes me because so much in life would seem to foster humility.

Holy men tell us life is a mystery.They embrace that concept happily.But some mysteries bite and barkand come to get you in the dark.

Usually I spare myself from the news, because if it’s not propaganda, then it’s one threat or another exaggerated to the point of absurdity, or it’s the tragedy of storm-quake-tsunami, of bigotry and oppression misnamed...

Jocko likes salty, Jocko likes sweet, but never bring Jocko any hot sauce, like with jalapenos, because it makes Jocko squirt funny-smelling stuff out his ears.

Your past is my Future.

Imagine that you are more than nothing. Evil made you, but you are no more evil than a child unborn. If you want, if you seek, if you hope, who is to say that your...

With lead he shaded love into the woman’s eyes.

Although he never speaks of how or what or why, I know that his childhood was difficult, that his parents broke his heart. Books and excess poundage are his insulation against pain.

Stormy Llewellyn, a woman of unconventional views, believes instead that our passage through this world is intended to toughen us for the next life. She says that our honesty, integrity, courage, and determined resistance to...

Grief can destroy you –or focus you. You can decide a relationship was all for nothing if it had to end in death, and you alone. OR you can realize that every moment of it...

Not everything that happens during the day is an open portending a good or evil development in the future, but everything has meaning to one degree or another, for the world is an ever-weaving tapestry...

…in an infinite universe, anything that could be imagined might somewhere exist.

If someone invented a thermometer that measured weirdness, it would probably melt under my tongue.

To believe in luck, you must believe that the universe is a roulette wheel and that instead of paying out to us what we have earned, it pays out only what it wishes. But it...

Besides, I can’t get to where I want to go by conscious or unconscious suicide. I’ve got my strange little life to lead. Leading it the best I can – that’s how I buy the...

Nothing supernatural has ever harmed me. My wounds and losses have all be at the hands of human beings…

What doesn’t quicken dies. That’s an indisputable truth of life.

In this world only the paranoid survive.

Knowing the names of things is a way to pay respect to the beauty of the world…

Although her eyes are neither golden nor heavenly blue, Terri Stambaugh has the vision of an angel, for she sees through you and knows your truest heart, but loves you anyway, in spite of all...

I need useful work to keep my mind occupied, but I’d like to find work where it’s…quieter.

She says that each of us has his or her role in life, and if we know ourselves well enough to understand what that role is, we will be happy doing nothing but what we...