novel

Wisdom tolerates blustered opinions, the better to dismiss them later with discovery.

Time lost to pointless delay can never be regained. It is the most reprehensible kind of theft. Why was it that men did not grasp this simple fact? Money comes and goes and comes again, and knowledge can be acquired and forgotten and rediscovered, but time once lost is lost for good, each passing second irretrievable.

It is only the sudden and unpredictable appearance of comets that spoils the immutable celestial sphere.

Was happiness (which was perhaps achieved not by getting what you wanted, but rather, by obtaining what you didn__ know you wished for until it was in hand) a hologram that would continually change appearance with the slightest shift of perspective? Or maybe happiness by definition was a temporary state of being recognizable only in hindsight. It was impossible to catch what always managed to be overrun and end up in the rear view mirror.

But if watching the sky is to be his duty, how should he begin? Now and then he has spotted one of the five bright planets or recognized a constellation, but he knows little about the turning of the heavens. When he contemplates the great distances between this and that, and the vast multitude of solitary objects spread over the celestial dome, he cannot fathom how one goes about searching for what is yet unknown.

Pak Karman hugged his wife__ gravestone tightly. __ou left without saying farewell!_ The whole of the graveyard was ablaze with light.

All this simply shows us that communalism and terrorism are nothing but opposite sides of the same coin. They keep feeding on each other in a vicious cycle, resulting in a society full of violence, hatred, sorrow and intolerance. Every communal act is used as a justification for mindless acts of terrorism . Similarly , each act of terrorism is used as a justification for such horrible atrocities like genocide and ethnic cleansing. And, it is always the innocent who get killed. This is the sad truth.

Most people surrendered fairy tale hopes in exchange for cookie cutter lives

Each time I discovered a potential link between one character__ story and another__, several more connections would reveal themselves, like a beautiful, complex web spinning itself.

Aut viam inveniam aut faciamIt means, in essence, "I'll find a way or I'll make one." It's how I live my life. Another definition is basically "Never give up," which is the path I've taken when it comes to writing books. I've been writing for almost 30 years and just had my first book, THE LOSSES, come out by a small press. And I'm psyched. Just keep on trucking.

It's hard. Being 15, 16, 17. You get so angry. You want to do something with that anger. I guess try to find some other way to let it out. Don't kill people. Don't kill yourself. Let yourself grow up a little. Then you might start to think differently about things. You might get new opportunities to do something with your life that you never thought possible as a teenager." -- Thomas Harvey from the upcoming novel, "Nikki White: Polar Extremes" (Nikki, #3)

His fierce appreciation of female beauty, the unrelenting desire he felt for their company, the pleasure he both derived and sought to give, had led him in and out of quite a few bedroom doors.

How astonishingly intimate the business of fiction is, more intimate than anything that issues from the psychiatrist__ couch or even the lovers_ bed. You see the soul, pinned and wriggling on the wall.

Fiction operates through the senses, and I think one reason that people find it so difficult to write stories is that they forget how much time and patience is required to convince through the senses. No reader who doesn't actually experience, who isn't made to feel, the story is going to believe anything the fiction writer merely tells him. The first and most obvious characteristic of fiction is that it deals with reality through what can be seen, heard, smelt, tasted, and touched.

Perhaps all love stories no matter how varied are essentially the same.

And although he recognized that tenderness was not the same as passion, and certainly not equivalent to love, for now it seemed to him a suitable substitute.

Was she happy? She thought _ yes, reasonably so. Then again, what was happiness but the vast terrain between ecstasy and agony? Was this too small an ambition?

...forever meant different things to people at different times. They could imagine what infinity looked and felt like as much as they wanted, but could never truly grasp its meaning nor bear its full weight.