Sometimes it seems that to exit this world, they must go through my heart, leaving me scarred and sore.

Waiting is one of the things that human beings cannot do well, though it is one of the essential things we must do successfully if we are to know happiness. We are impatient for the...

If you have to pay the bills, and you write something you’re not proud of, use a pen-name for that.

Either the gates of hell had opened, or Tom had lost his mind; for there could be nothing like this entity outside the precincts of the damned, except in the fevered fantasies of a raving...

He considered razing the house and rebuilding, but he realized that houses are not haunted, and regardless of the architecture with which we surround ourselves,our ghosts stay with us until we ourselves are ghosts.

If patterns exist in our seemingly patternless lives — and they do — then the law of harmony insists that the most harmonious of all patterns, circles within circles, will most often assert itself.

I’m not much for parties. Sometimes you have to wear a funny hat, sometimes they expect you to eat sushi, which is like eating bait. And there’s always some totally drunk girl who thinks you’re...

The less I have, the less I can lose.

I’m no more a wonder than anyone. And that’s what makes the world magical. Every baby’s a seed of wonder – that gets watered or it doesn’t.

But the universe in its immensity is nevertheless of a piece, and what applies at one end of it applies at the other. No doubt misery, like happiness and hope, is found throughout the stars.

Never leave a friend behind. Friends are all we have to get us through this life–and they are the only things from this world that we could hope to see in the next.

She turned more heads than a coven of chiropractors.

Human beings not only can’t bear too much reality, we flee from reality when someone doesn’t force us close enough to the fire to feel the heat on our faces.

So many things in my continuing education are learned by going where I have to go and doing what I have to do. Therefore, my only answer is: “I guess I’ll find out.

Nothing before its time, son. Everything in its own time, to its own schedule.

Each smallest act of kindness, reverberates across great distances and spans of time –affecting lives unknown to the one who’s generous spirit, was the source of this good echo. Because kindness is passed on and...

Loyal companions are an unequaled grace, stanching fear before it bleeds you numb, a reliable antidote for creeping despair.

We were fortunate his brief psychic vision distracted him from what his fingertips could have told him about my face.Of course we were aware that temporary clairvoyance was a lame and unlikely explanation. The ordering...

I survive by finding the sweet spot between reason and unreason, between the rational and irrational.

Once you have had a wonderful dog, a life without one, is a life diminished.

Listen, child—if you’re at a party with a hundred people and one of them is the devil, he’ll be the last one you’d suspect.

Even when God is your co-pilot, it pays to pack a parachute.

I’ve been badly scared myself, badly, for quite a few years now. You learn to live with it.

Pain can be endured and defeated only if it is embraced. Denied or feared, it grows in perception if not in reality. The best response to terror is righteous anger, confidence in ultimate justice, a...

Blood has an oder faint but distinct, of conceit and modesty, of courage and cowardice, of charity and greed, of faith and doubt, in short the fragrance of what we might have been and the...

You be careful, Wizard. Interestingly eccentric friends aren’t easy to find.

There’s more to me than you see, another me down inside somewhere, full of hate, ready to hurt, cut, smash, or if maybe there’s no Other and there’s just me alone, then I’m not the...

When Victoria told me how intensely she hated me, I kept the Beretta aimed at her face, but heard myself say, “I don’t hate you.”She called me an effing liar and said, “Hate makes the...

There is in me a darkness that, by darkness challenged, will rise up and have its way.

Although much that was precious has been taken from me in this life, I have reason to remain an optimist. After the numerous tight scrapes I’ve been through, by now I should have lost one...

My instinct is a winning coach, and when it said “Batter up,”I didn’t argue that I wasn’t ready for the game. I gripped the bat in both hands, assumed the stance, and said a prayer...

She says what holds their marriage together is that she feels too damn sorry for him to ask for a divorce.

Change isn’t easy. Changing the way you live means changing the way you think, means changing what you believe about life. That’s hard.

When we hope, we usually hope for the wrong thing.We yearn for tomorrow and the progress that it presents. But yesterday was once tomorrow, and where was the progress in it?Or we yearn for yesterday,...

Most people tend to think the best of those who are blessed with beauty; we have difficulty imagining that physical perfection can conceal twisted emotions or a damaged mind.

His resiliency was not the resiliency of the dumb but of a lamb who can remember hurt but cannot sustain the anger or the bitterness that brittles the heart.

The past cannot be redeamed. What has been and what might have been both bring us to what is. To know grief, we must be in the river of time, because grief thrives in the...

Chyna Shepherd, untouched and alive and able to pee.

You can’t fix things with a hug, but you can’t make them any worse either.

It was one of those rare times when remembering the dead was more inmportant than tending to the needs of the living.

There will be something very wrong with any place we go.

Well, Mr Thomas, while I’m in favour of education, I couldn’t in good conscience recommend a university career in anything but the hard sciences. As a working environment, the rest of academia is a sewer...

All she wanted was love with respect, respect was so important to her, and I could give her that.

She might have been born this way, without an empathy gene and other essentials. In that case, she would interpret any kindness as weakness. Among predatory beasts, any display of weakness is an invitation to...

She said…she said don’t be scared, we wasn’t born to be all the time scared, we was born happy, babies laugh at everything, we was born happy and to make a better world.

Some people think only intellect counts: knowing how to solve problems, knowing how to get by, knowing how to identify an advantage and seize it. But the functions of intellect are insufficient without courage, love,...

Sometimes, just trying was a triumph.

…what makes humanity beautiful is our free will, our individuality, our endless striving in spite of our imperfection.BY THE LIGHT OF THE MOONChapter 27 Page 214

By doing, I learn what to do. By going, I learn where to go. One day, by dying, I’ll learn how to die, and leave the world and hope to land in light.

What was destiny? What was the power that shaped the patterns and attempted to enforce them? God? Should she be raging at God – or begging Him to let her son live and to spare...