…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.

Not immediately able to proceed, I stood there, inexpressibly grateful that my life, for all its terrors, is so filled with moments of grace.

The less I have, the less I can lose.

She has suffered so much, and that sorrows me. But she has been strong in the face of unthinkable adversity, and that inspires me.

And because we have been given thought, will, and imagination, albeit on a human scale, we too have this power to create.

Evil travels the world in anonymity, its presence revealed only by the periodic consequences of its desires…

If patterns exist in our seemingly patternless lives — and they do — then the law of harmony insists that the most harmonious of all patterns, circles within circles, will most often assert itself.

You do what you have to do. That’s who you seem to be to me, anyway. You’re one who does what he has to do.

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.

So many things in my continuing education are learned by going where I have to go and doing what I have to do. Therefore, my only answer is: “I guess I’ll find out.

I’d had much practice turning my mind away from certain memories of my childhood. I could quickly dial her remembered voice from a whisper to a silence.

Don’t you love your mother, dear?””I guess so. A hard, sharp, thorny kind of love that might be pity more than anything else.

Even when God is your co-pilot, it pays to pack a parachute.

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...

My imagination is as rich as my bank account is empty.

The greatest danger, of course, was to believe that I was equal to them, because assurance can morph into arrogance that Death loves to prove unfounded.

All she wanted was love with respect, respect was so important to her, and I could give her that.

We were friends, never paramours. A lover who is enigmatic will most likely prove to be a cataclysm waiting to happen. But a charming friend whose usual warmth is raveled through moments of cool inscrutability...

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.

Not everything that happens during the day is an open portending a good or evil development in the future, but everything has meaning to one degree or another, for the world is an ever-weaving tapestry...

There will be something very wrong with any place we go.

Funny how people that don’t believe in nothin’ are so quick to believe every crazy story about people like us.

Ah, sir, that’s just mean. She’s not a Victoria’s Secret model, but she’s pretty in her way.

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.

But the line between moral behavior and narcissistic self-righteousness is thin and difficult to discern