"When you laugh at yourself, you gain perspective. Then you realize that the mistakes you made, as long as they didn't hurt anyone but yourself--well, you can forgive yourself for those."

"Knowing the names of things is a way to pay respect to the beauty of the world..."

"The secret is not to think, we think in words. And what lies beyond the reality we see is a truth that words can't contain, the secret is to feel."

"Don't you love your mother, dear?""I guess so. A hard, sharp, thorny kind of love that might be pity more than anything else."

"You be careful, Wizard. Interestingly eccentric friends aren't easy to find."

"Like all of us in this storm between birth and death, I can wreak no great changes on the world, only small changes for the better, I hope, in the lives of those I love."

"We need to laugh at the irrationality of evil, for in doing so we deny evil's power over us, diminish its influence in the world, and tarnish the allure it has for some people."

"Good fences make good neighbors, and these were apparently good enough that they had not felt the need for razor wire at the top. I crested the fence, threw myself into the yard beyond, fell, rolled to my feet, and ran with the expectation of being garroted by a taut clothesline.I heard panting, looked down, and saw a gold retriever running at my side, ears flapping. The dog glanced up at me tongue rolling, grinning, as though jazzed by the prospect of an unscheduled play session."

"If emotions were universal, then in one sense he was not alone, never had been alone, and never could be alone....No pain or happiness was unique. All humanity drank from the same river of emotion; and by drinking, every race, religion, and nationality became one indivisible species."

"To protect the innocent, to avoid being one of Burke's good men who do nothing, you have to accept permanent scars that cincture the heart and traumas of the mind that occasionally reopen to weep again."

"I can explain why I have to do what I'm about to do, but I'm acutely aware that an explanation is not a righteous justification. What's bad is bad even if necessary."

"The less I have, the less I can lose."

"If one's friends do not openly laugh at him, they are not in fact his friends."

"Some mysteries bite and barkand come to get you in the dark."

"Although he never speaks of how or what or why, I know that his childhood was difficult, that his parents broke his heart. Books and excess poundage are his insulation against pain."

"There are silences and silences. No one of them is like another. There is the silence of grief in velvet-draped rooms of a plushly carpeted funeral parlor which is far different from the bleak and terrible silence of grief in a widower's lonely bedroom."

"In this world only the paranoid survive."

"Free will," she agreed, "our greatest gift, the thing that makes life worth living, in spite of all the anguish it brings."

"That I had come full circle shouldn't have surprised me, for we are born into time only to be born out of it, after living through the cycles of the seasons, under stars that turn because the world turns, born into ignorance and acquiring knowledge that ultimately reveals to us our enduring ignorance: The circle is the essential pattern of our existence."

"The dead are merely the countrymen of my future."

"The geometry of judgment is a circle. Hate is a snake that turns to consume itself from the tail, a circle that diminishes to a point, then to nothing. Pride is such a snake, and envy, and greed. Love, however, is a hoop, a wheel, that rolls on forever. We are rescued by those whom we have rescued. The saved become the saviors of their saviors."

"Small-town boy meets big-time evil."

"In my personal life, I'm a comic novel. But then, so are we all, because we're human beings."

"I've been badly scared myself, badly, for quite a few years now. You learn to live with it."

"Because God is never cruel, there is a reason for all things. We must know the pain of loss; because if we never knew it, we would have no compassion for others, and we would become monsters of self-regard, creatures of unalloyed self-interest. The terrible pain of loss teaches humility to our prideful kind, has the power to soften uncaring hearts, to make a better person of a good one."

"Such grief might be to them quite delicious, a delicacy."

"Quick now, here, now, always, as if we are in a condition of complete simplicity..."

"My only armor is my belief that life has meaning..."

"...he was part of a family whether he wanted to be or not, the family of humanity, more often than not a frustrating and contentious clan, flawed and often deeply confused, but also periodically noble and admirable, with a common destiny that every member shared."

"As a writer, Bibi, you could be a doctor of the soul."

"Do as little harm to others as you can; make any sacrifice for your true friends; be responsible for yourself and ask nothing of others; and grab all the fun you can. Don't give much thought to yesterday, don't worry about tomorrow, live in the moment, and trust that your existence has meaning even when the world seems to be all blind chance and chaos. When life lands a hammer blow in your face, do your best to respond to the hammer as if it had been a cream pie."

"Writing a novel is like making love, but it's also like having a tooth pulled. Pleasure and pain. Sometimes it's like making love while having a tooth pulled."

"Of course, in the process, you must never do harm to others in any serious way, or you'll cease to amuse Him. Then payment comes due for promises you didn't keep."

"Language can't describe reality. Literature has no stable reference, no real meaning. Each reader's interpretation is equally valid, more important than the author's intention. In fact, nothing in life has meaning. Reality is subjective. Values and truths are subjective. Life itself is a kind of illusion. Blah, blah, blah, let's have another scotch."

"There's sometimes a weird benefit to having an alcoholic, violent father. He really motivated me in that I never wanted to be anything like him."

"Loyal companions are an unequaled grace, stanching fear before it bleeds you numb, a reliable antidote for creeping despair."

"Although I've said a million times that I'm not a horror writer, I do like horror."

"Evil was coming. I wondered whose face it would be wearing."

"Life, Stormy says, is not about how fast you run or even with what degree of grace. It's about perseverance, about staying on your feet and slogging forward no matter what."

"I have to admit that when I watch a movie in which there is no moral context for the violence - I find that offensive. I think that's potentially damaging to society."

"Narcissists are everywhere in this ripe age of self-love, which amazes me because so much in life would seem to foster humility."

"I suspect she must speak without emotion or otherwise entirely lose the self-control that is required to speak to me at all."

"...I stood there, inexpressibly grateful that my life, for all its terrors, is so filled with moments of grace."

"Are you one of those people who uses words more for the sound than for the sense of them?"

"People have a natural tendency to anthropomorphize their pets, to ascribe human perceptions and intentions to the animal where none exist."

"My life has a mysterious purpose that I don't understand, and day by day, conflict by conflict, I learn by going where I have to go."

"Each book is a mind alive, a life revealed, a world awaiting exploration, but living people are all those things, as well-and more, because their stories haven't yet been completely told."

"Every day we make our way through a moral forest, along pathways ever branching. Often we get lost.When the array of paths before us is so perplexing that we can't make a choice, or won't, we can hope that we will be given a sign to guide us. A reliance on sighs, however, can lead to the evasion of all moral obligations, and thus earn a terrible judgment."

"What was destiny? What was the power that shaped the patterns and attempted to enforce them? God? Should she be raging at God - or begging Him to let her son live and to spare her from the life of a cripple? Or was the power behind destiny merely a natural mechanism, a force no different in origin from gravity or magnetism?"

"He once told me that an August evening was "as hot as three toads in a Cuisinart," a comparison that left me blinking two days later."