"Now take my hand and hold it tight.I will not fail you here tonight,For failing you, I fail myselfAnd place my soul upon a shelfIn Hell's library without light.I will not fail you here tonight."

"We are coming out of a century that was taught that one way of looking at the world, that one form of behavior, is as valid as another. The idea of true evil has been blown away."

"There is in me a darkness that, by darkness challenged, will rise up and have its way."

"Once, there were no predators, no prey. Only harmony. There were no quakes, no storms, everything in balance. In the beginning, time was all at once and forever - no past, present, and future, no death. We broke it all."

"Once you have had a wonderful dog, a life without one, is a life diminished."

"His resiliency was not the resiliency of the dumb but of a lamb who can remember hurt but cannot sustain the anger or the bitterness that brittles the heart."

"To get through life successfully, body and soul must translate each other correctly more often than not."

"...because wonder admits to the existence of mystery, and the recognition of mystery in the world allows the possibility of Truth."

"When I woke up and the dark wasn't gone yet, and the dark seemed so big, then she sang soft and made the dark small again."That is the best of all things we can do for one another: Make the dark small."

"Then perhaps you shouldn't sleep. The imagination has terrifying power."

"It's only life. We all get through it. Not all of us complete the journey in the same condition. Along the way, some lose their legs or eyes in accidents or altercations, while others skate through years with nothing worse to worry about than an occasional bad-hair day."

"Duty is a good thing, a calling without which no civilization can survive, but it is also a weight and chain that sometimes seems sure to sink you to the airless bottom of a dark pool."

"All these girls swooning over hunky vampires, what they really want is to give away their freedom, to be controlled and told what to do and not have to think -- and never die, of course. It's sick is what it is. I don't want to be a forever-young living corpse."

"Every book has some real life in it. I was never pursued by an evil twin clone, but everything else in MR. MURDER was pretty much out of my own life."

"Talking about a problem sometimes makes it worse."

"Chronologically she is twelve but emotionally she is older, and intellectually older still."

"Being alone can be good. It's easy to find peace alone. But sometimes, being alone is a king of death."

"Never leave a friend behind. Friends are all we have to get us through this life--and they are the only things from this world that we could hope to see in the next."

"Most people desperately desire to believe that they are a 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."

"There is no fate, only free will, and we were just in the way of other people's free will when they decided to do the Devil's work."

"I don't desire a change of scenery or exotic experiences. My heart yearns for familiarity, stability, the comfort of home - and my sanity depends on it."

"In eighty-six years, child, I've learned the world is a far more mysterious place than most people realize and that every moment of life is woven through with meaning."

"I think the world is full of evil people. I think in some ways we're in more danger now than before."

"I don't write a quick draft and then revise; instead, I work slowly page by page, revising and polishing."

"Change isn't easy. Changing the way you live means changing the way you think, means changing what you believe about life. That's hard."

"..the most identifying trait of humanity is our ability to be inhumane to one another."

"Yet the human heart is disheartened by the most unreasonable self-judgments, because even when we take on giants, we too often confuse failure with fault, which I know too well. The only way back from such a bleak despondency is to shape humiliation into humility, to strive always to triumph over the darkness while never forgetting that the honor and the beauty are more in striving than in winning. When triumph at last comes, our efforts alone could not have won the day without that grace which surpasses all understanding and which will, if we allow it, imbue our lives with meaning."

"A grace is a thing you get from God, you use it to make a better world, or not use it, you have to choose."

"...your life is yours to shape as you wish with free will..."

"The past cannot be redeamed. What has been and what might have been both bring us to what is. To know grief, we must be in the river of time, because grief thrives in the present and promises to be with us in the future until the end point. Only time conquers time and its burdens. There is no grief before or after time, which is all the consolation we should need."

"Every expression of desired friendship has potential bite. Every smile reveals the teeth."

"He knew that fate was only a mythological concept."

"You are reformed, you may be a better man, but you are not a different man. How can you convince yourself of such a thing when you are so conversant with the theology of your faith? From one end of this life to the other, you carry with you all that you have done. Absolution grants you forgiveness for it, but does not expunge the past. The man you were still lives within you, repressed by the man you have struggled to become."

"If you have to pay the bills, and you write something you're not proud of, use a pen-name for that."

"The hands of every clock are shears, trimming us away scrap by scrap, and every time piece with a digital readout blinks us towards implosion."

"I'm small, I'm young - and I'm so different. You've always respected that difference, and you've always trusted it. Trust me now. There's a reason I am the way I am, and there's a reason I was born to you. There's always a reason. We belong together."

"If patterns exist in our seemingly patternless lives - and they do - then the law of harmony insists that the most harmonious of all patterns, circles within circles, will most often assert itself."

"It's only life. We all get through it."

"I have been reading Stephen King since CARRIE and hope to read him for many years to come."

"Always, the eye sees more than the mind can comprehend, and we go through life self-blinded to much that lies before us. We want a simple world, but we live in a magnificently complex one, and rather than open ourselves to it, we perceive the world through filters that make it less daunting."

"Holy men tell us life is a mystery.They embrace that concept happily.But some mysteries bite and barkand come to get you in the dark."

"Dogs needed no words to console you. Dogs were the ultimate practitioners of the therapy of touch. Dogs knew and accepted the hard realities of life that human beings could not acknowledge until those obvious truths were exhaustively described with words, and even then there was often more bitter acknowledgment than humble acceptance."

"We were friends, never paramours. A lover who is enigmatic will most likely prove to be a cataclysm waiting to happen. But a charming friend whose usual warmth is raveled through moments of cool inscrutability can be an intriguing companion."

"The human imagination may be the most elastic thing in the universe, stretching to encompass the millions of dreams that in centuries of relectless struggle built modern civilization, to entertain the endless doubts that hamper every human enterprise, and to conceive the vast menagerie of boogeymen that trouble every human heart."

"I'm no more a wonder than anyone. And that's what makes the world magical. Every baby's a seed of wonder - that gets watered or it doesn't."

"Some people misunderstand evil and believe it will relent, and because their misplaced hope inspires dark hearts to dream darker dreams, they are the fathers and mothers of all wars. Evil does not relent; it must be defeated. And even when defeated, uprooted, and purified by fire, evil leaves behind a seed that will one day germinate and, in blooming, again be misunderstood."

"I needed a moment to understand that I'd been dreaming, that I had come awake, and another moment to remember where I had gone to bed."

"You won't find the truth of life in morbidity, only in hope."

"Well, Mr Thomas, while I'm in favour of education, I couldn't in good conscience recommend a university career in anything but the hard sciences. As a working environment, the rest of academia is a sewer of irrationality, hate mongering, envy, and self-interest. I'm getting out the moment I earn my twenty-five-year pension package, and then I'm going to write novels..."

"With lead he shaded love into the woman's eyes."