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

Once, there were no predators, no prey. Only harmony. There were no quakes, no storms, everything in balance. In the beginning, time was all at once and forever — no past, present, and future, no...

We can approach belief from an intellectual path, but in the end, God must be taken on faith. Proofs are for things of this world, things in time and of time, not beyond time.

Her stare was direct and unwavering, full of confidence earned from painful experience…

She says that each of us has his or her role in life, and if we know ourselves well enough to understand what that role is, we will be happy doing nothing but what we...

Narcissists are everywhere in this ripe age of self-love, which amazes me because so much in life would seem to foster humility.

I had not asked to be born. Only to be loved.

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...

To get through life successfully, body and soul must translate each other correctly more often than not.

…guilt is deserved only when the effort to resist evil is never made.

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

Even the wisest and the best of us can be foolish occasionally.

Knowing the names of things is a way to pay respect to the beauty of the world…

Even if there are moments during the day when all seems normal and when every action of your own and of those around you seems to be unremarkable, the appearance of ordinariness is an illusion,...

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 am learning my way toward something that will make sense of my life, and I learn by going where I have to go, with whatever companions I am graced.

Hope, love and faith are in the waiting.

Although he never speaks of how or what or why, I know that his childhood was difficult, that his parents broke his heart. Books and excess poundage are his insulation against pain.

All death matters.””Only to the living.