Irrational fear feeds on itself and grows. You must deny it.
One of the good things about being twelve or younger is that you tend to believe that you’ll live forever.
I said what might have been a bad word meaning excrement, but I hope that I used a polite synonym.
Most people unconsciously blind themselves to the true nature of existence, because they fear knowing that this world is a place of mystery and meaning. It’s immeasurably easier to live in a world that’s all surfaces, that means nothing and demands nothing of you.
Desperation is energized despair, and despair is the abandonment of hope.
He actually felt as if God had sent the retriever to intrigue him, to remind him that the world was full of surprises and that despair made no sense when one had no understanding of the purpose – and strange possibilities – of existence.
Understanding wasn’t always necessary, as long as you believed.
Nothing I could say or do would help her. Life is hard in a world gone wrong.
Her grief was now doubled by his grief. She wondered how many heartbreaks a child so young could endure.
Living in a monastery, even as a guest rather than a monk, you have more opportunities than you might have elsewhere to see the world as it is, instead of through the shadow that you cast upon it.
When he looked away from her, the bottles were gone and with them all the vertical and horizontal currents of water and brandy that represented the omnidirectional tides of time’s ocean.
To have your life blow up four times before you’re thirty would take something out of anyone, and I think it drained from my mom just enough hope that she never quite built her confidence back to what it once had been.
Most people regarded Psychology as a science. Some called it a soft science, but those making such a distinction grew fewer by the year.
If coincidence can give, it can take.
No matter how close we are to another person, few human relationships are as free from strife, disagreement, and frustration as is the relationship you have with a good dog. Few human beings give of themselves to another as a dog gives of itself.
What we fear too much we often bring to pass.
Regardless of what our Creator intended us to be, what we have become is what we are.
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 leg, three fingers, one buttock, most of my teeth, an ear, my spleen, and my sense of fun. But here I am.
Art is the only answer to chaos and the void.
Any thoughtful physicist, he said, well schooled in quantum mechanics, would agree that all time exists simultaneously, which I subsequently learned was the case. In truth, Father said, as the first instant of the universe, all of time was present, all our yesterdays and today and all our tomorrows, everyone and everything that was and ever would be existed at that moment.