odd-thomas

Her direct stare probed, as if the story of my life were written in my eyes in a few succinct lines that she could read.

Free will," she agreed, "our greatest gift, the thing that makes life worth living, in spite of all the anguish it brings.

He would never need a knife to spread a pat of butter on his toast. That smile would quickly melt it.

Ambition and stupidity are a dangerous combination.

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

If you really truly want to know, I've thought if I was ever free someday, I might discover I've held my tears so long that I can't cry anymore, that I'm a dry stone and nothing can ever be wrung from me.

Don't you love your mother, dear?""I guess so. A hard, sharp, thorny kind of love that might be pity more than anything else.

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

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?

If she fully embraced life with all its conflicts, she would suffer a breakdown.

I had not asked to be born. Only to be loved.

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

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

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

Sleep is a kind of peace, and I have not yet earned peace.

I am amazed that there are still nights when I sleep well.

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.

Three more words. Be happy. Persevere.