"Her eyes were clear; she hadn't been crying. She was a cop's wife first, a woman second; she wouldn't give in to tears as long as Wyatt was fighting for his life because she was fighting with him in spirit."

"Being a bad guy was easy, being a hero was hard."

"No one can grant you happiness. Happiness is a choice we all have the power to make."

"On a small table beside his chair were other haphazardly stacked volumes by such poets as Emerson, Whitman, and Wallace Stevens, a dangerous crew to let into your head."

"Although enlightened people know that an extreme phobia wasn't a form of madness, hey could not help but regard it as odd."

"Each smallest act of kindness, reverberates across great distances and spans of time --affecting lives unknown to the one who's generous spirit, was the source of this good echo. Because kindness is passed on and grows each time it's passed until a simple courtesy becomes an act of selfless courage, years later, and far away. Likewise, each small meanness, each expression of hatred, each act of evil."

"...love was the closest thing to immortality that men would ever know and that the only--and best--answer to death is loving. Loving."

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

"What really holds their marriage together are mutual respect of an awesome depth, a shared sense of humor, faith that they were brought together by a force greater than themselves, and a love so unwavering and pure that it is sacred."

"Nothing is worse than being alone on the evening of the day when one's cow has exploded."

"I like to deal with EVERY aspect of our condition, and that means terror and humor in equal mix. Some books have more room for humor than others."

"Sometimes enlightenment descends upon you when you least expect it..."

"There will be something very wrong with any place we go."

"Truth is always stranger than fiction. We craft fiction to match our sense of how things ought to be, but truth cannot be crafted. Truth is, and truth has a way of astonishing us to our knees. Reminding us, that the universe does not exist to fulfill our expectations. Because we are imperfect beings who are self-blinded to the truth of the world's stunning complexity, we shave reality to paper thin theories and ideologies that we can easily grasp " and we call them truths. But the truth of a sea in all it's immensity cannot be embodied in one tidewashed pebble."

"I have avoided becoming stale by putting a little water on the plate, lying on the plate, and having myself refreshed in a toaster oven for 23 minutes once every month."

"Imagine that you are more than nothing. Evil made you, but you are no more evil than a child unborn. If you want, if you seek, if you hope, who is to say that your hope might not be answered?"

"A sixth sense is a miraculous thing, which in itself suggests a supernatural order. The human intellect, however, for all its power and triumphs, is largely formed by this world and is therefore corruptible."

"Somebody asked me about the current choice we're being given in the presidential election. I said, Well, it's like two of the scariest movies I can imagine."

"Now, sprawled comfortably in his motel bed, Anson Sharp enjoyed the sleep of the amoral, which is far deeper and more restful than the sleep of the just, the righteous, and the innocent."

"Maybe magic and love, together, can achieve what magic alone cannot."

"She said...she said don't be scared, we wasn't born to be all the time scared, we was born happy, babies laugh at everything, we was born happy and to make a better world."

"If someone wrote it and it had a peculiar twist, I've read it."

"There's just something unsettling about studying your reflection. It's not a matter of being dissatisfied with your face or of being embarrassed by your vanity. Maybe it's that when you gaze into your own eyes, you don't see what you wish to see-or glimpse something that you wish weren't there."

"I've not seen in my lifetime any politician who is a heroic figure. The manipulation that all politicians use on one level or another is so transparent."

"Beauty that steals the heart is often imperfect, suggests grace and kindness, and inspires tenderness more than it incites lust."

"In this world where too many are willing to see only the light that is visible, never the Light Invisible, we have a daily darkness that is night, and we encounter another darkness from time to time that is death, the deaths of those we love, but the third and most constant darkness is with us everyday, at all hours of every day, is the darkness of the mind, the pettiness and meanness and hatred, which we have invited into ourselves, and which we pay out with generous interest."

"I was looking forward to having a halo. It would make such a convenient reading lamp."

"Jocko likes salty, Jocko likes sweet, but never bring Jocko any hot sauce, like with jalapenos, because it makes Jocko squirt funny-smelling stuff out his ears."

"Remember, there are cookies waiting here for you."

"So many things in my continuing education are learned by going where I have to go and doing what I have to do. Therefore, my only answer is: "I guess I'll find out."

"That is, Jack thought, the way of life. The horror changes us, because we can never forget. Cursed with memory. It starts when we're old enough to know what death is and realize that sooner or later we'll lose everyone we love. We're never the same. But somehow we're all right. We go on."

"We are all the walking wounded in a world that is a war zone. Everything we love will be taken from us, everything, last of all life itself. Yet everywhere I look, I find great beauty in this battlefield, and grace and the promise of joy."

"Virtue is imaginative, evil repetitive."

"Embrace the weather, child, and you'll understand the balance of the world."

"What has been is no more. Change has come."

"From birth to death we explore and seek, and in the end we arrive where we started, the past having made one great slow turn on a carousel to become our future, and if we have learned anything worth learning, the carousel will bring us to the one place we most need to be."

"A politician's goal is always to manipulate public debate. I think there are some politicians with higher goals. But all of them get corrupted by power."

"...on a subconscious level we're aware that time isn't enduring, that it is not a required condition of our existence, that there comes a point when we will have no need of it."

"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."

"Your mind always does worse things than people can show in a movie."

"Intuition is seeing with the soul."

"The line between moral behavior and narcissistic self-righteousness is thin and difficult to discern. The man who stands before a crowd and proclaims his intention to save the seas is convinced that he is superior to a man who merely picks up his own and other people's litter on the beach, when in fact the latter is in some small way sure to make the world a better place, while the former is likely to be a monster of vanity whose crusade will lead to unintended destruction."

"People who were perfectly sane on Tuesday sometimes go nuts on Wednesday."

"These days, all I ask Fate is that the people she hurls into my life, whether they are evil or good, or morally bipolar, should be amusing to one degree or another."

"My imagination is as rich as my bank account is empty."

"Do not doubt the beauty of your heart."

"Initially the snow had been beautiful, but not so much now. The softness and sparkle still charmed, but the storm occluded the sky, denying us the stars. At the moment, I needed to see a firmament of stars, needed to gaze past the moon and through the constellations, needed to see what can't be seen--infinity."

"She never had much in this life, but with the simplest things, she made her corner of the world as beautiful as any king's palace. We may lack riches, but the greatest fortune is what lies in our hearts."

"But the line between moral behavior and narcissistic self-righteousness is thin and difficult to discern."

"The worst happens when you least expect it."