I am the One, and I see all.But the blind man in Apartment 1-A is blind in many ways, as are all human beings, even those with functioning eyes. They are blind to their folly,...

Were you always such a snake,” the child asked, “or did you grow into what you are?

Years later, after other experiences with dogs, I wondered if their species were shaped and charmed to serve as four-legged guides able to assist in leading humanity back to our first—and lost—home. By the example...

It’s a world of sorrow, Oddie, because we make it so.

She would have thought that working and living in continuous happiness, harmony, and security day after day would lead to mental lethargy, that her writing would suffer from too much happiness, that she needed a...

There’s just something unsettling about studying your reflection. It’s not a matter of being dissatisfied with your face or of being embarrassed by your vanity. Maybe it’s that when you gaze into your own eyes,...

Now, sprawled comfortably in his motel bed, Anson Sharp enjoyed the sleep of the amoral, which is far deeper and more restful than the sleep of the just, the righteous, and the innocent.

When I woke up and the dark wasn’t gone yet, and the dark seemed so big, then she sang soft and made the dark small again.”That is the best of all things we can do...

Play hard. Play, play, play like your life depends on it. Because it does.

We’ve only been sitting here forty minutes. I’m never at the morning table less than an hour and a half. I do some of my finest plotting over breakfast coffee and raisin brioche.

I was looking forward to having a halo. It would make such a convenient reading lamp.

For a long time things were so bad. Very bad. Dark even when there was light.The only thing that kept the dark back was the Forever Shiny Thing that was her secret…It is a word…the...

That stormy day in the desert, however, much changed for me. We must have our goals, our dreams and we must strive for them. We are not gods, however; we do not have the power...

people have a natural tendency to anthropomorphize their pets, to ascribe human perceptions and intentions to the animal where none exist

Considering that the modern and contemporary literature taught in most universities is largely bleak, cynical, morbid, pessimistic, misanthropic dogmatism, often written by suicidal types who sooner or later kill themselves with alcohol or drugs, or...

And the ache is always there, but one day not the emptiness, because to nurture the emptiness, to take solace in it, is to disrespect the gift of life.

Evil never dies. It just changes faces.

Quantum theory tells us, Mr. Thomas, that every point in the universe is intimately connected to every other point, regardless of apparent distance. In some mysterious way, any point on a planet in a distant...

I am sustained by the certainty that life has meaning. As does death.

Intuition is seeing with the soul.

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...