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 death. We broke it all.
Intuition is the highest form of knowledge. What we learn from others can be mistaught by those not a fraction as knowledgeable as they pretend or by those who are propagandists with agendas. We are born with intuition, however, which includes the natural law, a sense of right and wrong.
The stakes were suddenly so high that we wanted out of the game. When you’re playing poker with the devil, however, no one leaves the table before he does.
Lying won’t get you anything but misery.
He is like a man living through the night before doomsday, with full knowledge that the sun will go nova in the morning, yet unable to enjoy the precious pleasures of this world because all his energy is devoted to wishing desperately that the foreseen end will not, after all, come to pass.
What we had both done was keep on keeping on, which is all any of us can do.
Some wish to believe that greed is the root of murder, but greed seldom motivates a killer. Most homicide has the same dreary cause: The bloody-minded murder those whom they envy, and for what they covet.
Norman Bates was happy just dressing up like his mother and stabbing people,” Chief Porter said, “but Hannibal Lecter has to cut off their faces and eat their livers with fava beans. The role models have become more intense.
Regardless of how rough we may appear on the exterior, each of us had a human heart.
Never waste energy beating yourself up. Other people are always standing in line to do it.
At fifty-one, why would she choose to dispose of her house, uproot herself, and come here to be a part of your work if she didn’t feel that, for the first time in her life, she was profoundly known for who she is, that she was at last cherished for who she truly is?
They warn that any effort to put two objects in the same place at the same time will have catastrophic consequences. When you think about it, a lot of fundamental physics is the solemn statement of the absurdly obvious. Any drunk who has tried to put his car where a lamppost stands is a self-educated physicist.
My parents didn’t raise me to ask God for blessings or benefits. For guidance, yes. For the strength to do the right thing, yes. Not for a winning lottery number, not for love or health, or happiness. Prayer is not a gimme list; God isn’t Santa Claus.
I’m serious,′ he said, though aware of how odd it was that he should choose to inform his wife of a personal crisis by comparing it to the experiences of a mystery novel heroine whom he had created. Was the dividing line between life and fiction as hazy for other people as it sometimes was for a writer? And if so... was there a book in that idea?
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.
You could know the science of a thing and still find the phenomenon mysterious and mystical, and feel small and vulnerable in the face of it.
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 from me, immeasurably more confident than I am now, still able to hope, but not as wise, and I mourn for him.
He continued to stroke its back and scratch its ears, but after a minute or two he realized he was seeking something from the dog that it could not provide: meaning, purpose, relief from despair.
The trouble with the what-if game was that once you began to play it, you couldn’t just quit whenever you wanted. From one what-if grew another.
She turned to him, shook her head. Her black hair tossed, and the beams of the late-afternoon sunlight played upon it, sending brief ripples of red and green and blue through it the same way that light, shimmering on the black surface of oil, creates short-lived, wriggling rainbows.