That surge of power and delight, of confidence, of control. That sudden sense of the richness of the world. Its infinite possibility.

...with a grief no less sharp for not being intimate with its object.

I suppose the shock of recognition is one of the nastiest shocks of all.

It was like waking from a nightmare to a worse nightmare.

their reality was far more interesting than any idealized version could possibly be

But, if I dare say it, it wasn't until I had helped kill a man that I realized how elusive and complex an act a murder can actually be, and not necessarily attributable to one dramatic motive.

Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw, " that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?

I have only to glance over my shoulder for all those years to drop away and I see it behind me again, the ravine, rising all green and black through the saplings, a picture that will never leave me.

The ceilings had set off a ghostly echo, giving all that desperate hilarity the quality of a memory even as I sat listening to it, memories of things I'd never known.

I sometimes get the feeling that he was less pleased by kindness itself than by the elegance of the gesture.

Though Julian could be marvelously kind in difficult circumstances of all sorts, I sometimes got the feeling that he was less pleased by kindness itself than by the elegance of the gesture.

It's not about whether or not someone is a bigot, but whether or not the argument which that someone is arguing is worth being a bigot about.

It is man who has abandoned God, not God who has abandoned man.

What is your name?” I asked.“Thorn.”“Thorn?”“If you touch me, you bleed.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.

Liberal soccer moms are precisely as likely to receive anthrax in the mail as to develop a capacity for linear thinking.

There is a way to live the big of giving thanks in all things. It is this: to give thanks in this one small thing. The moments will add up.

Nothing is as important to muscle growth as good nutrition.

We think we have to do something to be grateful or something has to be done in order for us to be grateful, when gratitude is a state of being.

You can make anything out of anything.

I can remember hockey. It was my life, my passion. It's what I love the most.