"Too much mystery is merely an annoyance. Too much adventure is exhausting. And a little terror goes a long way."

"Her exceptional beauty also helps her to keep her secrets. Most people tend to think the best of those who are blessed with beauty, we have difficulty imagining that physical perfection can conceal twisted emotions or a damaged mind."

"What we fear too much we often bring to pass."

"When Victoria told me how intensely she hated me, I kept the Beretta aimed at her face, but heard myself say, "I don't hate you."She called me an effing liar and said, "Hate makes the world go around. Envy, lust and hate.""I stopped hating anyone the day when I realized hating can't restore to me anything that's lost."

"A man begins dying at the moment of his birth. Most People live in denial of Death's patient courtship until, late in life and deep in sickness, they become aware of him sitting bedside."

"...up to no good-and pleased about it."

"They said there was no rest for the wicked. In fact, there was rest neither for the virtuous nor the wicked, nor for guys like Billy, who were uncommitted regarding the whole idea of virtue versus wickedness and who were just trying to do their jobs."

"Even as a child, she had preferred night to day, had enjoyed sitting out in the yard after sunset, under the star-speckled sky listening to frogs and crickets. Darkness soothed. It softened the sharp edges of the world, toned down the too-harsh colors. With the coming of twilight, the sky seemed to recede; the universe expanded. The night was bigger than the day, and in its realm, life seemed to have more possibilities."

"Each reader needs to bring his or her own mind and heart to the text."

"Words are the wellspring of the world, and language is the most powerful weapon in the ancient and still unfolding war between truth and lies."

"Unreason is an essential medicine as long as you do not overdose."

"The truth was stranger than the official fiction."

"I'm alive but I have no life. I'm alive but also dead. I'm dead and alive."

"Pico Mundo is a prosperous town. But no degree of prosperity can be sufficient to eliminate all misfortune, and sloth is impervious to opportunity."

"There's no use wasting are energy being afraid of the devils, demons and things that go bump in the night... Because ultimately we'll never encounter anything more terrifying than the monster among us. Hell is where we make it."

"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."

"From all these friends, I could not escape learning some of the statistics that I preferred not to know. Forty-one people at the mall had been wounded. Nineteen had died. Everyone said it was a miracle that only nineteen perished. What has gone wrong with our world when nineteen dead can seem like any kind of miracle?"

"She has suffered so much, and that sorrows me. But she has been strong in the face of unthinkable adversity, and that inspires me."

"I've got a long list of books I wish I'd never written-and I've kept them all out of print for the past 20 years."

"If you want to publish two books a year under your own name and your publisher doesn't, maybe you need a different publisher."

"We don't have time for such uncertainty because it reliably breeds indecision, and indecision is one of the mothers of failure."

"If you're going to keep the music in you, Jonah, you've got to play a little bit every day purely for pleasure. Otherwise, you'll lose the joy of it, and if you lose the joy, you won't sound good to those who know piano - or to yourself."

"You can change the road you take, but sometimes it can bend back to lead you straight to that same stubborn fate."

"A broken thing can't fix itself."

"Nothing supernatural has ever harmed me. My wounds and losses have all be at the hands of human beings..."

"In self-defense and in defense of the innocent, cowardice is the only sin."

"Readers will stay with an author, no matter what the variations in style and genre, as long as they get that sense of story, of character, of empathetic involvement."

"Blood has an oder faint but distinct, of conceit and modesty, of courage and cowardice, of charity and greed, of faith and doubt, in short the fragrance of what we might have been and the smell of what we are..."

"My parents didn't raise me to ask God for blessings or benefits. For guidance, yes. For the strength to do the right thing, yes. Not for a winning lottery number, not for love or health, or happiness. Prayer is not a gimme list; God isn't Santa Claus."

"I survive by finding the sweet spot between reason and unreason, between the rational and irrational."

"Listen, child-if you're at a party with a hundred people and one of them is the devil, he'll be the last one you'd suspect."

"I stopped in St. Bernadette's Cemetery one of my favorite places... The trunks of six giant oaks rise like columns supporting a ceiling formed by their interlocking crowns. In the quiet space below, is laid out an aisle similar to those in any library. The gravestones are like rows of books bearing the names of those whose names have been blotted from the pages of life; who have been forgotten elsewhere but are remembered here."

"In the war, to survive, you had to be responsible every minute of every day, unhesitatingly responsible for yourself, for your every action. You had to be responsible for your buddies, too, because survival wasn't something that could be achieved alone. That's maybe the one positive thing about fighting in a war - it clarifies your thinking and makes you realize that a sense of responsibility is what separates good men from the damned."

"In a book, even the real bastards can't hurt you. And you can never loose a friend you make in a book. When you get to a sad part, no one's there to see you cry. Or wonder why you don't cry when you should."

"In tragedy and despair, when an endless night seems to have fallen, hope can be found in the realization taht the companion of night is not another night, that the companion of night is day, that darkness always gives way to light, and that death rules only half of creation, life the other half."

"In his mind he saw them standing with the tips of their organs pressed together ejaculating into each other's penis."

"I was like a thought slipping through the fissures..."

"...Here lie your hopes and dreams, shattered and swept aside..."

"Her eyes were celadon saucers but bottomless, of such great depth that she could take in the knowledge of whole worlds and have room in that gaze for still more."

"But with the morning almost gone, with seven bodachs in the recreation room, with living boneyards stalking the storm, with Death opening the door to a luge chute and inviting me to go for a bobsled ride, I didn't have time to put on a victim suit and tell the woeful tale of my sorrowful childhood. Neither time nor the inclination."

"This isn't a reasoned response to a configuration of stars, but the heart cannot flourish on logic alone. Unreason is an essential medicine as long as you don't overdose."

"It's funny, ma'am, how sometimes you're so sarcastic but it doesn't sting.""Because of my dimples. Dimples are a get-out-of-jail-free card."

"This time I would choose to err on the side of illogic. I had to trust intuition, and plunge as I had never plunged before, with blind faith."

"We ate food that wasn't healthy. We let dirty dishes stack up in the sink. We slept too much.We talked about everything, everything but the slaughter at the mall. Our past, our future. We planned. We dreamed."

"Human beings not only can't bear too much reality, we flee from reality when someone doesn't force us close enough to the fire to feel the heat on our faces."

"When I was no longer of the world, I would miss its extravagant beauty. I would miss the complex and charming layers of subterfuge by which the truth of the world's mysteries were withheld from us even as we were tantalized and enchanted by them. I would miss the kindness of good people who were compassionate when so many were pitiless, who made their way through so much corruption without being corrupted themselves, who eschewed envy in a world of envy, who eschewed greed in a world of greed, who valued truth and could not be drowned in a sea of lies, for they shone and, by the light they cast, they warmed me all my life."

"People who go to work every day, make sacrifices to raise families, and get through life without hurting other people if they can help it-those are the real heros."

"Laser beams slid around them, spurts of light sinking through the darkness, eventually touching the stars or lighting the water for a moment on their death ride to the murky bottom."

"He's a man," Themla said."I guess that explains it.""Hairy, Neanderthalic," Thelma said, "perpetually half-crazed from excessive levels of testosterone, plagued by racial memories of the lost glory of mammoth-hunting expeditions - they're all alike."

"Golden retrievers are not bred to be guard dogs, and considering the size of their hearts and their irrepressible joy in life, they are less likely to bite than to bark, less likely to bark than to lick a hand in greeting. In spite of their size, they think they are lap dogs, and in spite of being dogs, they think they are also human, and nearly every human they meet is judged to have the potential to be a boon companion who might, at many moment, cry, "Let's go!" and lead them on a great adventure."