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 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...

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.

What really holds their marriage together are mutual respect of an awesome depth, a shared sense of humor, faith that they were brought together by a force greater than themselves, and a love so unwavering...

Duty is a good thing, a calling without which no civilization can survive, but it is also a weight and chain that sometimes seems sure to sink you to the airless bottom of a dark...

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...

I warned myself against the danger of compassion in this case. How easy it would be to imagine the traumas of childhood that might have deformed her into the moral monster she had become, and...

Life without meaningcannot be borne.We find a missionto which we’re sworn–or answer the callof Death’s dark horn.Without a gleaningof purpose in life,we have no vision,we live in strife,–or let blood fallon a suicide knife.

If you really truly want to know, I’ve thought if I was ever free someday, I might discover I’ve held my tears so long that I can’t cry anymore, that I’m a dry stone and...

the worst happens when you least expect it

After his dinner, the wolfhound liked to prowl the grounds, sniffing the grass to learn what creatures of field and forest had recently visited. The yard was Merlin’s newspaper.

There’s no use wasting are energy being afraid of the devils, demons and things that go bump in the night… Because ultimately we’ll never encounter anything more terrifying than the monster among us. Hell is...

We can approach belief from an intellectual path, but in the end, God must be taken on faith. Proofs are for things of this world, things in time and of time, not beyond time.

My unique path through life has led me, however, to fear known threats but seldom the unknown, while most people fear both.

He would pray…for everyone who knew pain, which meant everyone who wore a human face.

If an eighty-six-year-old woman has been clear-seeing from a young age, she will have gone through a lot of life developing a keen eye for snares and pitfalls, an ear for deceit, and a good...

I’m small, I’m young – and I’m so different. You’ve always respected that difference, and you’ve always trusted it. Trust me now. There’s a reason I am the way I am, and there’s a reason...

Evil was coming. I wondered whose face it would be wearing.

I don’t know if this deception qualified as a half-step down the slippery slope. I had no sensation of sliding. But of course we never notice the descent until we’re rocketing along at high velocity.

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

Embrace the weather, child, and you’ll understand the balance of the world.

Sully disapproved of destruction for destruction’s sake, which seemed ever more popular in the modern world, but he always took delight in burning out or otherwise eliminating Evil when Evil just couldn’t keep its ugly...

They said there was no rest for the wicked. In fact, there was rest neither for the virtuous nor the wicked, nor for guys like Billy, who were uncommitted regarding the whole idea of virtue...

The truth was stranger than the official fiction.

Give the narrative a lighter tone than you think it deserves, dear boy, lighter than you think you can bear to give it,” he instructed before I began to write, “because you won’t find the...

Maybe if everything was beautiful, nothing would be.People saw one thing, they swooned over it. They saw this other thing, they pounded it with sticks.Maybe there had to be variety for life to work. Swoon...

She never had much in this life, but with the simplest things, she made her corner of the world as beautiful as any king’s palace. We may lack riches, but the greatest fortune is what...

Billy Pilgrim had a theory about diaries.Women were more likely than men to think that their lives had sufficient meaning to require recording on a daily basis. It was not for the most part a...

Hand-to-hand combat with three hundred pounds of screaming monkey menace is not my idea of a fair fight. My idea of a fair fight is one unarmed, toothless, nearsighted old monkey versus me with a...

In this world where too many are willing to see only the light that is visible, never the Light Invisible, we have a daily darkness that is night, and we encounter another darkness from time...

She blinked, sat up, and saw Chris in the bathroom doorway. He’d just gotten out the shower. His hair was damp, and he was dressed only in his briefs. The sight of his thin, boyish...