Only the human spirit can act with volition and consciously change itself; it is the only thing in all creation that is not entirely at the mercy of forces outside itself.
What looks tragic might be comic on second consideration, and what is comic might bring tears in time.
Fate cannot be sidestepped or outrun.
Loneliness comes in two basic varieties. When it results from a desire for solitude, loneliness is a door we close against the world. When the world instead rejects us, loneliness is an open door, unused.
In this uncertain space between birth and death, especially here at the end of the world in Moonlight Bay, we need hope as surely as we need food and water, love and friendship.
In a crunch a man’s reputation never counts for as much as it ought to.
Fear is a hammer, and when the people are beaten finally to the conviction that their existence hangs by a frayed thread, they will be led where they need to go.
I can’t go on to page two until I can get page one as perfect as I can make it. That might mean I will rewrite and rewrite page one 20, 30, 50, 100 times.
Books are packaged dreams.
I believe in the possibility of miracles but, more to the point, I believe in our need for them.
Of all the things we can feel with our minds and bodies, severe pain is the purest, for it drives everything else from our awareness and focuses us as perfectly as we can ever be focused.
She might have been born this way, without an empathy gene and other essentials. In that case, she would interpret any kindness as weakness. Among predatory beasts, any display of weakness is an invitation to attack.
She says what holds their marriage together is that she feels too damn sorry for him to ask for a divorce.
I don’t find slashing and blood flying everywhere to be scary. I just find it repulsive.
Although the constant shadow of certain death looms over everyday, the pleasures and joys of life can be so fine and affecting that the heart is nearly stilled in astonishment.
Because people see violence on the movie screen, they’re not going to go out and hold up a liquor store and kill somebody. It really doesn’t correlate.
The world needed a little Evil, so Good had something to compare itself to, but you couldn’t let it think it had the right-of-way on the road and an invitation to dinner.
Maybe I’m needy, neurotic, paranoid. Under the circumstances, of course, if I weren’t needy, neurotic, and paranoid, I’d obviously be psychotic.
Every eye sees its own special vision; every ear hears a most different song. In each man’s troubled heart, an incision would reveal a unique, shameful wrong.
Home is the first refuge from – and last defense against – the disappointments and the terrors of life.