"Fighting for peace, is like f***ing for chastity."

"Get busy living, or get busy dying."

"Atonement was powerful, it was the lock on the door you closed against the past."

"The memories: they are the reality."

"I know how bad you boys feel, but the sun will still come up tomorrow. And when it does, you 'll feel better. When the sun comes up the day after tomorrow, a little better still. This is just a part of your life, and it's over. It would have been better to win, but either way, it's over. Life will go on."

"And, instead of pelting these babbling idiots with their own freshly toasted marshmallows, everyone else sitting around the fire is often nodding and smiling and looking solemny thoughtful."

"To do otherwise with a 'prentice was to ask for a second, less playful bite. And who would be to blame for that? Who but the teacher? For was he not training her to bite? Training both of them to bite?"

"There's an idea that hell is other people. My idea is that it might be repetition."

"Sooner or later even the fastest runners have to stand and fight."

"You ought to sue that son of a whore."

"Valuables. That was a hot one, Richards thought, unbuttoning his shirt. He had an empty wallet with a few pictures of Sheila and Cathy, a receipt for a shoe sole he had replaced at the local cobbler's six months ago, a keyring with no keys on it except for the doorkey, a baby sock that he did not remember putting in there, and the package of Blams he had gotten from the machine."

"It was sweet and lovely, that smile, perhaps the more so because it wasn't complicated by much in the way of thought."

"And so will the world end, I think, a victim of love rather than hate. For love's ever been the more destructive weapon, sure."

"The rest of it - and perhaps the best of it - is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will."

"It's about how some people carelessly squander what others would sell their souls to have: a healthy, pain-free body. And why? Because they're too blind, too emotionally scarred, or too self-involved to see past the earth's dark curve to the next sunrise. Which always comes, if one continues to draw breath."

"But this wealth of information produced little or no insight."

"Feelings are invulnerable to rational thought."

"I don't believe in any actual thinking God that marks the fall of every bird in Australia or every bug in India, a God that records all of our sins in a big golden book and judges us when we die - I don't want to believe in a God who would deliberately create bad people and then deliberately send them to roast in a hell He created-but I believe there has to be something."

"Fault always lies in the same place: with him weak enough to lay blame."

"The man in black travels with your soul in his pocket."

"One of life's great truths is this: when one is about to be struck by a speeding six-hundred pound Coke machine, one need worry about little else."

"I discovered news of old horrors in old books; read intelligence of old atrocities in old periodicals; always in the back of my mind, every day a bit louder, I heard the seashell drone of some growing, coalescing force; I seemed to smell the bitter ozone aroma of lightings-to-come."

"You can't deny laughter; when it comes, it plops down in your favorite chair and stays as long as it wants."

"Never's the word God listens for when he needs a laugh."

"French is the language that turns dirt into romance."

"The family exists for many reasons, but its most basic function may be to draw together after a member dies."

"Each year the world Rich lived in felt more and more like a huge electronic haunted house in which digital ghosts and frightened human beings lived in uneasy coexistence."

"You must not come lightly to the blank page."

"Kindle, isn't it? the waitress asked. "I got one for Christmas, and I love it. I'm reading my way through all of Jodi Picoult's books. "Oh, probably not all of them, Wesley said. "Huh? Why not? "She's probably got another one done already. That's all I meant. "And James Patterson's probably written one since he got up this morning! she said, and went off chortling."

"Horror spawns horror."

"When you'retwenty-one, life is a roadmap.It's only when you get to betwenty-five or so that youbegin to suspect you've beenlooking at the map upsidedown, and not until you'reforty are you entirely sure."

"He who speaks without an attentive ear is mute."

"No good friends, no bad friends; only people you want,need to be with. People who build their houses in your heart ."

"I have spent a good many years since-too many, I think-being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all."

"Our memories have voices, too. Often sad ones that clamor like raised arms in the dark."

"Nothing in nature is that even, man is the inventor of straight edges."

"Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent. What I wonder is why everybody doesn't carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life."

"If I kept saying it, if I kept reaching out. My accident really taught me just one thing: the only way to go on is to go on. To say 'I can do this' even when you know you can't."

"I was tired of just letting things happen to me and then feeling bad about them."

"Payback is a bitch, and the bitch is back."

"Everybody trusts a guy in a raincoat. I don't know why. It's just one of those mystery facts."

"Tim stared at the steel rod in the gloved hand. "Is that a magic wand?"The Covenant Man appeared to consider. "I suppose so. Although it started life as the gearshift of a Dodge Dart, America's economy car, young Tim."What's America?"A kingdom filled with toy-loving idiots. It has no part in our palaver."

"I think the best stories always end up being about the people rather than the event, which is to say character-driven."

"Am I weird? Yeah. But so what? Everybody's weird."

"The glory of a good tale is that it is limitless and fluid, a good tale belongs to each reader in its own particular way."

"There were people who lied for gain, people who lied from pain, people who lied simply because the concept of telling the truth was utterly alien to them . . . and then there were people who lied because they were waiting for it to be time to tell the truth."

"She couldn't be on his wavelength all the time. That's all. When you could recognize that and deal with it, you were on your way to an adult relationship."

"Kill you all!" The clown was laughing and screaming. "Try to stop me and I'll kill you all! Drive you crazy and then kill you all! You can't stop me!"

"Cat can have kittens in the oven, girl, but that won't ever make em muffins."

"Animals don't know as much about jealousy as people, but they're not ignorant of it, either."