…up to no good—and pleased about it.

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

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...

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.

Sometimes enlightenment descends upon you when you least expect it…

Denial couldn’t be maintained.

Her exceptional beauty also helps her to keep her secrets. 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...

My only armor is my belief that life has meaning…

The uniqueness of every soul is not a theme that our current culture, obsessed with group identities, cares to assert.

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...

On a small table beside his chair were other haphazardly stacked volumes by such poets as Emerson, Whitman, and Wallace Stevens, a dangerous crew to let into your head.

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.

In all our lives, however, there are many days when we die a little, when we are wounded by loss or failure, or by fear, or by seeing the suffering of others for whom we...

So,” said the Russian, after regaining is composure, “the lesson of the model is that the universe——all its matter and forms of energy——arise out of thought.

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

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

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

Fate isn’t a straight road,” I said, becoming the oracle that earlier in the day I had declined to be for her. “There are forks in it, many different routes to different ends. We have...

Nothing is worse than being alone on the evening of the day when one’s cow has exploded.

Pico Mundo is a prosperous town. But no degree of prosperity can be sufficient to eliminate all misfortune, and sloth is impervious to opportunity.

Beauty that steals the heart is often imperfect, suggests grace and kindness, and inspires tenderness more than it incites lust.

Most people desperately desire to believe that they are a part of a great mystery, that Creation is a work of grace and glory, not merely the result of random forces colliding. Yet each time...

But with the morning almost gone, with seven bodachs in the recreation room, with living boneyards stalking the storm, with Death opening the door to a luge chute and inviting me to go for a...

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...

…the more we learn, the more we realize how much we don’t know.

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

In eighty-six years, child, I’ve learned the world is a far more mysterious place than most people realize and that every moment of life is woven through with meaning.

More likely, they would just cease to exist.””That’s death.””No, it’s different. Death leaves a corps.

Ambition and stupidity are a dangerous combination.

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...

Recognizing the structure of your psychology doesn’t mean that you can easily rebuild it.

These days, all I ask Fate is that the people she hurls into my life, whether they are evil or good, or morally bipolar, should be amusing to one degree or another.

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...

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.

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

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...

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.

In memory, she lived and moved and laughed, but all that a photograph could offer was one frozen moment of a life.

Are you one of those people who uses words more for the sound than for the sense of them?

From all these friends, I could not escape learning some of the statistics that I preferred not to know. Forty-one people at the mall had been wounded. Nineteen had died. Everyone said it was a...

…because wonder admits to the existence of mystery, and the recognition of mystery in the world allows the possibility of Truth.

Every journey has a destination, known or unknown.

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,...

Then perhaps you shouldn’t sleep. The imagination has terrifying power.

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.

Some people like to hear themselves talk, but I like to hear myself silent.

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...

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.

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...

Virtue is imaginative, evil repetitive.