Imagination just wasn't up to the task of understanding unique and foreign sensations. It knew only how to dampen or augment what it already knew. - Juliette, Pg. 139

Killing a man should be harder than waving a length of pipe in their direction. It should take long enough for one's conscience to get in the way.

Even in the darkness, his smile threw shadows.

It was the hubris of each generation to think this anew, to think that their time was special, that all things would come to an end with them.

Fiction challenges us and works its miracles by placing us in the skin of another human being and teaching us empathy.

Sometimes a thing needed opening before closure was found.

It’s easy to forgo distractions and to not accumulate things when you have a larger goal on the horizon.

I'd rather excite the imagination of a legion of readers and make pennies from each of them than hold off for a larger chunk of change from only a handful of fans.

Heroes didn't win. The heroes were whoever happened to win. History told their story -- the dead didn't say a word. All of it was bullshit.

"What we control," Juliette said, "is our actions once fate puts us there."

My life is too tight, he wanted to say. My skin is too tight. The walls are too tight.

The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear.

The myth of self-sufficiency demands optimism without end, downplays life’s challenges, and shames us when, inevitably, we fall short.

The worst thing I can say about democracy is that it has tolerated the right hon. Gentleman for four and a half years.

The Christian "doctrines" are translations into our concepts and ideas of that which God has already expressed in language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection

Friendship is the most constant, the most enduring, the most basic part of love.

I have searched for my forehead to find a secret writing about my fate and I found no trace of destiny, but my very own decisions!

To reflect on the essence of the Creator ... is forbidden to the human intellect because of the severance of all relation between the two existences.

Sir, I have found you an argument; but I am not obliged to find you an understanding.

At first it was exhilarating but when I realized it wasn't going away, it became scary and claustrophobic. Fame is a weird thing.

...We are all Federalists,and we are all Republicans.