There is in me a darkness that, by darkness challenged, will rise up and have its way.

Do not doubt the beauty of your heart.

Knowing the names of things is a way to pay respect to the beauty of the world...

...the more we learn, the more we realize how much we don't know.

We make so many of our own troubles, from mere mishaps to disasters, by dwelling on the possibility of them until the possible becomes inevitable.

All death matters.""Only to the living.

The dead can be even more frustrating to deal with than are many of the living, which is astonishing when you consider it's the living who run the Department of Motor Vehicles.

I never plan for the future but wander into it with a smile on my face, hope in my heart, and the hair up on the nape of my neck.

If there's nothing to learn because we know it all, what's the challenge? Why would the effort matter? What would be the point? - Odd Thomas

Virtue is imaginative, evil repetitive.

In memory, she lived and moved and laughed, but all that a photograph could offer was one frozen moment of a life.

A badly written novel can always be shortened to a poem.

The realm of liberation is absolutely incommensurable with the relativities of higher and lower, better and worse, gain and loss, since these are all disadvantages of the ego.

Rome was not built in a day.

I vividly remember the stories my grandfather told me about the carnage of the First World War, which people tend to forget was one of the worst massacres in human history.

Drugs are very much a part of professional sports today, but when you think about it, golf is the only sport where the players aren't penalized for being on grass.

When you stop comparing what is right here and now with what you wish were, you can begin to enjoy what is.

Everyone is always surprised by how old I am. They think I'm older, but it's always been that way. I'm the youngest of four - maybe you grow up quicker because you just watch the big people.

It might, too, have been the singular cold that alienated me; for such chilliness was abnormal on so hot a day, and the abnormal always excites aversion, distrust, and fear.

I live most of the time in New York now. I have an apartment there.

All of your experience comes into play when you're composing.