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...

A sixth sense is a miraculous thing, which in itself suggests a supernatural order. The human intellect, however, for all its power and triumphs, is largely formed by this world and is therefore corruptible.

A broken thing can’t fix itself.

Too much mystery is merely an annoyance. Too much adventure is exhausting. And a little terror goes a long way.

Every day we make our way through a moral forest, along pathways ever branching. Often we get lost.When the array of paths before us is so perplexing that we can’t make a choice, or won’t,...

I suspect she must speak without emotion or otherwise entirely lose the self-control that is required to speak to me at all.

Stay low, stay quiet, keep it simple, don’t expect too much, enjoy what you have.

Be you and only you, which means be you and all the people you have loved…

Her eyes were celadon saucers but bottomless, of such great depth that she could take in the knowledge of whole worlds and have room in that gaze for still more.

Denial couldn’t be maintained.

…hope and trust will more reliably keep a man afloat, while fear is more like to sink him.

Eventually he understood that he was crying for himself. He was ashamed of the man whom he had become, mourning the man whom he had expected to be when he’d been a boy.

If you’re still, and if you don’t hope too much, peace will come to you. It’s a grace. But you have to choose happiness.

We are all the walking wounded in a world that is a war zone. Everything we love will be taken from us, everything, last of all life itself. Yet everywhere I look, I find great...

Virtue is imaginative, evil repetitive.

Keep in mind the roots of violence: Lust, envy, anger, avarice, and vengeance…the taproot…the killer’s ultimate and truest motivation…is the hatred of truth…the hatred of truth is a vice. From it comes pride and an...

You’re a poster boy for sincerity. You have all the guile of a lamb.

To spare Cloyce’s victims further indignities to their memory, I must be a scourge. To prevent others from perhaps being infected by Cloyce’s depravity by watching him at work, I must be a scourge. To...

This time I would choose to err on the side of illogic. I had to trust intuition, and plunge as I had never plunged before, with blind faith.

From birth to death we explore and seek, and in the end we arrive where we started, the past having made one great slow turn on a carousel to become our future, and if we...

On the third, directly before me, were embedded more polished letters: PER OMNIA SAECULA SAECULORUM.For ever and ever. In the red light, the brushed steel glowed softly, like embers. The polish letters blazed.Without a hiss,...

Fate isn’t one straight road…there are forks in it, many different routes to different ends. We have the free will to choose the path.

the divine has taken a few steps back from humankind, perhaps in revulsion, perhaps because we don’t deserve to look directly upon holy beings anymore…. When the divine enters the world these days from outside...

Money and beauty are defenses against the sorrows of this world but neither can undo the past. Only time will conquer time. The way forward is the only way back to innocence and to peace.

Appearances are not reality; but they often can be a convincing alternative to it. You can control appearances most of the time, but facts are what they are. When the facts are too sharp, you...

Strange how the deepest part of us isn’t able to speak more clearly to the part of us that lives only here in the shallows of the world.