When you laugh at yourself, you gain perspective. Then you realize that the mistakes you made, as long as they didn’t hurt anyone but yourself——well, you can forgive yourself for those.

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

I feel like I’ve been sliding all day.

Be afraid in proportion to the threat.

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...

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

Three more words. Be happy. Persevere.

…an age-old patter that seemed like chaos but was not…

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...

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

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.

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

…because wherever else the future leads, it leads ultimately to death, the end that is present in my beginning and in yours.

I never plan for the future but wander into it with a smile on my face, hope in my heart, and the hair up on the nape of my neck.

Whatever happens here, trust your heart. It’s as true as any compass.

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

Darkness doesn’t fall at a predictable schedule. Darkness can overwhelm you any time of the day, as you know well.

He would never need a knife to spread a pat of butter on his toast. That smile would quickly melt it.

Remember, there are cookies waiting here for you.

Life had been hard on this girl, Jacob, but she had enough courage for an army.

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...

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...

…he looked as if nothing hard in the world had touched him…

Every beautiful facade seemed to conceal rot and ruin that I could almost see.

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...

Then the clarifying thing happens, and what you need to do, what you must do, is not a question, not demand more revelation than what is given, be quiet in the face of it, quiet...

Duty doesn’t need to call; it only needs to whisper. And if you heed the call, no matter what happens, you have no need for regret.” Odd Thomas

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,...

In even a clear heart, some righteous acts of the harder kind can stir up a sediment of guilt, but that is not a bad thing. If allowed to be, the heart is self-policing, and...

I was like a thought slipping through the fissures…

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

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.

What we fear too much we often bring to pass.

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...

These days, all I ask of 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. This is...

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...

When I function in only one mode or the other, I am denying half myself, half my potential.

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.

A broken thing can’t fix itself.

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...

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...

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...

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

Translating the words on the door, he said, “Light from light.” “Waste and void, waste and void. Darkness on the face of the deep,” I said. “Then God commanded light. The light of the world...

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

…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…