"It's immeasurably easier to live in a world that's all surfaces, that means nothing and demands nothing of you."

"I receive about 10,000 letters a year from readers, and in the first year after a book is published, perhaps 5,000 letters will deal specifically with that piece of work."

"Ah, sir, that's just mean. She's not a Victoria's Secret model. but she's pretty in her way."

"To many people, free will is a license to rebel not against what is unjust or hard in life but against what is best for them and true."

"Hope, love, and faith are in the waiting."

"If something in your writing gives support to people in their lives, that's more than just entertainment-which is what we writers all struggle to do, to touch people."

"Hell of a thing to have to experience, hell of a thing to have to see, to be reminded you're a human being and all it meant to be one."

"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."

"People hide truths about themselves from themselves. Such self-deception is a coping mechanism, and to one extent or another, most people begin deceiving themselves when they're children."

"I don't find slashing and blood flying everywhere to be scary. I just find it repulsive."

"I think it's the people who have no doubt that every word they put down is gold that probably don't write very well."

"Human beings can always be relied upon to exert, with vigor, their God-given right to be stupid."

"He would pray...for everyone who knew pain, which meant everyone who wore a human face."

"Books were this wonderful escape for me because I could open a book and disappear into it, and that was the only way out of that house when I was a kid."

"Appearances are not reality; but they often can be a convincing alternative to it. You can control appearances most of the time, but facts are what they are. When the facts are too sharp, you can craft a cheerful version of the situation and cover the facts the way that you can covered a battered old four-slice toaster with a knitted cozy featuring images of kittens."

"In this age, lies were the universal lubricant of the culture. A love of Truth and commitment to it were seldom rewarded and were often punished."

"Stormy Llewellyn, a woman of unconventional views, believes instead that our passage through this world is intended to toughen us for the next life. She says that our honesty, integrity, courage, and determined resistance to evil are evaluated at the end of our days here, and that if we come up to muster, we will be conscripted into an army of souls engaged in some great mission in the next world. Those who fail the test simply cease to exist."

"After his dinner, the wolfhound liked to prowl the grounds, sniffing the grass to learn what creatures of field and forest had recently visited. The yard was Merlin's newspaper."

"Nothing before its time, son. Everything in its own time, to its own schedule."

"All she wanted was love with respect, respect was so important to her, and I could give her that."

"He wondered why it was easier to believe in a malevolent spirit than in a benign one. Sometimes it seemed that the human heart, this side of Eden, feared eternal life more than death, light more than darkness, freedom more than surrender."

"People existed, however, who believed that closet racist were everywhere around them. They needed to believe this in order to have prupose and meaning in their lives, and to have someone to hate."

"Some people think only intellect counts: knowing how to solve problems, knowing how to get by, knowing how to identify an advantage and seize it. But the functions of intellect are insufficient without courage, love, friendship, compassion, and empathy."

"I'd always had an ear for beauty, and maybe I'd had an eye for it as well, but until that day, I'd not recognized that the truth in great music could be found also in great art, that the heart could be lifted and the mind sharpened equally by both."

"I am learning my way toward something that will make sense of my life, and I learn by going where I have to go, with whatever companions I am graced."

"Terror and pleasure are linked in us. We are a baldly miswired species, Martie. Terror delights us, both the experience of terror and the dealing out of it to others. We are healthier if we admit to this miswiring and do not struggle to be better than our natures allow."

"Acknowledge your fear, odd one. Fearlessness is for the insane and the arrogant. You are neither. Those who rely on you for their lives will be well served only if you fear what you should fear. You are a unique soul, a child of grace, but you can still fail yourself and others."

"All death matters.""Only to the living."

"It's a world of sorrow, Oddie, because we make it so."

"Every journey has a destination, known or unknown."

"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."

"When I function in only one mode or the other, I am denying half myself, half my potential."

"Some people like to hear themselves talk, but I like to hear myself silent."

"That was the splendid thing about life: Though it was cruel, it was also mysterious, filled with wonder and surprise; sometimes the surprises were so amazing that they qualified as miraculous, and by witnessing those miracles, a despondent person could discover a reason to live, a cynic could obtain unexpected relief from ennui, and a profoundly wounded boy could find the will to heal himself and medicine for melancholy."

"...and where the Ferris wheel carried its passengers high and brought them low and raised them high and brought them low again, as if it were not merely a carnival ride but also a metaphor for the basic pattern of human experience."

"The more you expect from life, the more your expectations will be fulfilled. By laughing, you do not use up your laughter, but increase your store of it. The more you love, the more you will be loved. The more you give, the more you will receive. Life proves that truth every hour, every day. And life continues to surprise."

"Most people regarded Psychology as a science. Some called it a soft science, but those making such a distinction grew fewer by the year."

"This may be the primary purpose of dogs: to restore our sense of wonder and to help us maintain it, to make us consider that we should trust our intuition as they trust theirs and to help us realize that a thing known intuitively can be as real as anything known by material experience."

"Recognizing the structure of your psychology doesn't mean that you can easily rebuild it."

"Waiting is one of the things that human beings cannot do well, though it is one of the essential things we must do successfully if we are to know happiness. We are impatient for the future and try to craft it with our own powers, but hte future will come as it ocmes and will not be hurried."

"Hope wasn't a cottage industry; it was neither a product that she could manufacture like needlepoint samplers nor a substance she could secrete, in her cautious solitude, like a maple tree producing the essence of syrup. Hope was to be found in other people, by reaching out, by taking risks, by opening her fortress heart."

"Sometimes there is no darker place than our thoughts, the moonless midnight of the mind."

"He's got a chloroform-soaked rag in one hand, and before Judy realizes what's happening, the dude is all over her like fat on cheese."

"As I turned to leave the tent, she said, "Don't worry. Your own mother wouldn't know you."I said, "She never has."

"Sleep is a kind of peace, and I have not yet earned peace."

"In even a clear heart, some righteous acts of the harder kind can stir up a sediment of guilt, but that is not a bad thing. If allowed to be, the heart is self-policing, and a reasonable measure of guilt guards against corruption."

"What doesn't quicken dies. That's an indisputable truth of life."

"Tommy and Scootie locked eyes. Only minutes ago, he wouldn't have believed that he could ever have felt such a kinship with the Labrador as he felt now."

"He considered razing the house and rebuilding, but he realized that houses are not haunted, and regardless of the architecture with which we surround ourselves,our ghosts stay with us until we ourselves are ghosts."

"Civilization rests on the fact that most people do the right thing most of the time."