The chief characteristics of my childhood were an aching loneliness and the daily struggle to avoid a bleakness of spirit that unrelieved loneliness can foment.
Still abiding under the same vault of stars that were, to her, filled with wonder and mystery; but that were, to him, nothing more than distant balls of fire and cataclysm.
I’m Odd but I’m not nuts.
Maybe you’re not a believer, but if you’re honest, you’ll have to agree that something is wrong with this place. Senseless violence, corrupting envy, greed, blind hatred, and willful ignorance seem to be proof that Earth has gone haywire, but so is the absurdity that we see everywhere.
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.
Only the moonlit mind allows wonder, and it is in the thrall of wonder that you can see the intricate weave of the world of which you are but one thread, one fantastic and essential thread.
I needed a moment to understand that I’d been dreaming, that I had come awake, and another moment to remember where I had gone to bed.
The uniqueness of every soul is not a theme that our current culture, obsessed with group identities, cares to assert.
I guess I need to get my paranoid on.
You reap what you sow, and if you reap kindness it is because of the seeds of greater kindness you’ve sown so broadly.
In times as turbulent as these, but also in the seeming humdrum of daily life, which always proved to be more meaningful and consequential in retrospect, each of us needed to rely on people of constant character and truths that were immutable.
I’ve read more truth in fiction than in nonfiction, partly because fiction can deal with the numinous, and nonfiction rarely does.
Power is the central promise of evil, the dark light of that lamp, because nothing extinguishes the soul more quickly than pride in power.
To an extent, his good looks would insulate him from suspicion, for in this new century, image trumped substance and appearance often mattered more than truth.
When I was a child, I first thought that these shades might be malevolent spirits who fostered evil in those people around whom they swarmed. I’ve since discovered that many human beings need no supernatural mentoring to commit acts of savagery; some people are devils in their own right, their telltale horns having grown inward to facilitate their disguise.
The flesh on the nape of my neck did the crawly thing that it does so well. Some people say this is God’s warning that the devil is near, but I’ve noticed I also experience it when someone serves me Brussels sprouts.
Once truth was known, it could not be unlearned, nor could it be forgotten, but lay always in the heart, a darkness for which all the years ahead would be spent seeking whatever light could be found to compensate.
I am an optimist about our species. I assume God is, too, for otherwise He would have scrubbed us off the planet a long time ago and would have started over.
If these people harbored secrets that might destroy them, inviting strangers to stay in Roseland was self-destructive.
Little City wasn’t really a city. It was more like a big town, with twenty thousand citizens. There had been fewer than four hundred residents when Thomas Little founded the place, but he had been a man with big dreams and no regard for the truth.