"Ambition and stupidity are a dangerous combination."
"Do not doubt the beauty of your heart."
"...up to no good—and pleased about it."
"Knowing the names of things is a way to pay respect to the beauty of the world..."
"...the more we learn, the more we realize how much we don't know."
"We make so many of our own troubles, from mere mishaps to disasters, by dwelling on the possibility of them until the possible becomes inevitable."
"All death matters.""Only to the living."
"The dead can be even more frustrating to deal with than are many of the living, which is astonishing when you consider it's the living who run the Department of Motor Vehicles."
"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."
"If there's nothing to learn because we know it all, what's the challenge? Why would the effort matter? What would be the point? - Odd Thomas"
"Virtue is imaginative, evil repetitive."
"In memory, she lived and moved and laughed, but all that a photograph could offer was one frozen moment of a life."
"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 are able to offer only pity, for whom we are powerless to offer aid, we are beyond mercy."
"I was like a thought slipping through the fissures..."
"Were you always such a snake," the child asked, "or did you grow into what you are?"
"There is in me a darkness that, by darkness challenged, will rise up and have its way."
"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 beauty in this battlefield, and grace and the promise of joy."
"Virtue is imaginative. Evil, repetitive."
"The uniqueness of every soul is not a theme that our current culture, obsessed with group identities, cares to assert."
"When Victoria told me how intensely she hated me, I kept the Beretta aimed at her face, but heard myself say, "I don't hate you."She called me an effing liar and said, "Hate makes the world go around. Envy, lust and hate.""I stopped hating anyone the day when I realized hating can't restore to me anything that's lost."
"There will be something very wrong with any place we go."
"Ah, sir, that's just mean. She's not a Victoria's Secret model. but she's pretty in her way."
"What we fear too much we often bring to pass."
"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."
"I am amazed that there are still nights when I sleep well."