Greater self-awareness,” he’d told Rocky on a night when sleep wouldn’t come, “doesn’t make a species any happier, pal. If it did, we’d have fewer psychiatrists and barrooms...
The unthinking embrace of irrationality is literally madness. But embracing rationality while denying the existence of any mystery to life and its meaning – that is no less a form of madness than is eager devotion to unreason.
He lives vividly in her recollections, however, and his memory is etched on her soul.
All she wanted was love with respect, respect was so important to her, and I could give her that.
I had not asked to be born. Only to be loved.
Be afraid in proportion to the threat.
It had sure felt like death, but then everything since had felt like life.
I disliked guns, but I learned to use them. I had come to understand guns, that they were tools and that they were no more evil, in their essence, than pliers and wrenches. At times, they were a necessity. In a world of evil, they were often also a blessing. Now and then, as I’ve said, I was able to.
He would never need a knife to spread a pat of butter on his toast. That smile would quickly melt it.
Most people desperately desire to believe that they are part of a great mystery, that Creation is a work of grace and glory, not merely the result of random forces colliding. Yet each time that they are given but one reason to doubt, a worm in the apple of the heart makes them turn away from a thousand proofs of the miraculous, whereupon they have a drunkard’s thirst for cynicism, and they feed upon despair as a starving man upon a loaf of bread.
I knew that suffering can purify, that it’s a kind of fire that can be worth enduring, but there were degrees of it to which I chose not to subject myself.
I hate violence. I hate injustice more. I just want to be a fry cook, but the world demands more from me than eggs and pancakes.
When a man of ideals decides he is too old to risk everything for what he believes in, then he is no longer a man of ideals. He may no longer be a man at all.
Life is so filled with unavoidable conflict that I see no reason to promote more confrontations.
Even the most exotic excursions can become tedious through repetition.
You will see that this is true, though you will also see that between the mad and the misguided, the line is as thin as a split hair that has been split again.
It’s a world of sorrow, Oddie, because we make it so.
Her eyes were clear; she hadn’t been crying. She was a cop’s wife first, a woman second; she wouldn’t give in to tears as long as Wyatt was fighting for his life because she was fighting with him in spirit.
As they have taught me, I believe that without asking, we are given all we need. We must have the wit and wisdom to recognize the strengths and tools at our command, and find the courage to do what must be done.
People go through life failing to see all sorts of amazing things because they aren’t expecting to see them.