Best 195 quotes in «odd thomas quotes» category

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.

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

Even when God is your co-pilot, it pays to pack a parachute.

Every day we make our way through a moral forest, along pathways ever branching. Often we get lost. When the array of paths before us is so perplexing that we can't make a choice, or won't, we can hope that we will be given a sign to guide us. A reliance on sighs, however, can lead to the evasion of all moral obligations, and thus earn a terrible judgment.

Every journey has a destination, known or unknown.

Evil travels the world in anonymity, its presence revealed only by the periodic consequences of its desires...

Funny how people that don't believe in nothin' are so quick to believe every crazy story about people like us.

...he looked as if nothing hard in the world had touched him...

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.

Her stare was direct and unwavering, full of confidence earned from painful experience...

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

I am learning my way toward something that will make sense of my life, and I learn by going where I have to go, with whatever companions I am graced.

I could live with one butt cheek — just sit at a slant for the rest of my life, not worry about how baggy the seat of my blue jeans looked, get used to the nickname Halfass — but I couldn't live with my brains blown out.

If an eighty-six-year-old woman has been clear-seeing from a young age, she will have gone through a lot of life developing an eye for snares and pitfalls, an ear for deceit, and a good nose for knavery. And by such an age, a smart woman with no delusions is one to whom courage comes far more readily than it does to those young people who don't yet know the world for what it is.

If patterns exist in our seemingly patternless lives — and they do — then the law of harmony insists that the most harmonious of all patterns, circles within circles, will most often assert itself.

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

If we rely upon the tao with which we're born, we always know what is the right thing to do in any situation, the good thing not for our bank accounts or for ourselves, but for our souls. We are tempted from the tao by self-interest, by base emotions and passions.

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.

I'm not much for parties. Sometimes you have to wear a funny hat, sometimes they expect you to eat sushi, which is like eating bait. And there's always some totally drunk girl who thinks you're smitten by her, when what you're really wondering is if she'll vomit on your shirt or instead on your shoes.

In all our lives, however, there are many days when we die a little, when we are wounded by loss or failure, or by fear, or by seeing the suffering of others for whom we are able to offer only pity, for whom we are powerless to offer aid, we are beyond mercy.

I need useful work to keep my mind occupied, but I'd like to find work where it's...quieter.

In eighty-six years, child, I've learned the world is a far more mysterious place than most people realize and that every moment of life is woven through with meaning.

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.

In my bones, I know that I am not long for this world.

In time she said, "I love you, Oddie." My voice was thick when I replied. "I love you more than life.” "We'll be okay," she said. "We are okay." "We're weird and screwed-up, but we're okay," she agreed. "If someone invented a thermometer that measured weirdness, it would melt under my tongue. But you-you're cool.

Irrational fear feeds on itself and grows. You must deny it.

It had sure felt like death, but then everything since had felt like life.

It's a world of sorrow, Oddie, because we make it so.

It's difficult to spend time in any carnival or amusement park and not realize that a repressed fear of death may be the one emotion that is constant in the human heart even if, most of the time, it is confined to the unconscious as we go about our business. Thrill rides offer us a chance to acknowledge our ever-present dread, to release the tension that arises from repression of it, and to subtly delude ourselves with the illusion of invulnerability that surviving the Big Drop can provide.

It's only life. We all get through it. Not all of us complete the journey in the same condition. Along the way, some lose their legs or eyes in accidents or altercations, while others skate through years with nothing worse to worry about than an occasional bad-hair day.

I've been badly scared myself, badly, for quite a few years now. You learn to live with it.

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

Embrace the weather, child, and you'll understand the balance of the world.

Even if there are moments during the day when all seems normal and when every action of your own and of those around you seems to be unremarkable, the appearance of ordinariness is an illusion, and just below the placid surface, the world is seething.

Eventually he understood that he was crying for himself. He was ashamed of the man whom he had become, mourning the man whom he had expected to be when he'd been a boy.

Even the wisest and the best of us can be foolish occasionally.

Every beautiful facade seemed to conceal rot and ruin that I could almost see.

Every place is the same place in the end.

Everything barbarians do is nothing, no matter how loudly they insist it's something.

Evil never dies. It just changes faces.

Fate isn't a straight road," I said, becoming the oracle that earlier in the day I had declined to be for her. "There are forks in it, many different routes to different ends. We have the free will to choose the path.

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

From birth to death we explore and seek, and in the end we arrive where we started, the past having made one great slow turn on a carousel to become our future, and if we have learned anything worth learning, the carousel will bring us to the one place we most need to be.

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?

Give the narrative a lighter tone than you think it deserves, dear boy, lighter than you think you can bear to give it," he instructed before I began to write, "because you won't find the truth of life in morbidity, only in hope.

...guilt is deserved only when the effort to resist evil is never made.

...Here lie your hopes and dreams, shattered and swept aside...

Her exceptional beauty also helps her to keep her secrets. Most people tend to think the best of those who are blessed with beauty; we have difficulty imagining that physical perfection can conceal twisted emotions or a damaged mind.

His failure to defeat something more powerful than himself, and the scar that reminds him of his failure, is no reason for shame; guilt is deserved only when the effort to resist evil is never made. Yet the human heart is disheartened by the most unreasonable self-judgments, because even when we take on giants, we too often confuse failure with fault, which I know too well. The only way back from such a bleak despondency is to shape humiliation into humility, to strive always to triumph over the darkness while never forgetting that the honor and the beauty are more in the striving than in the winning. When triumph at last comes, our efforts alone could not have won the day without that grace which surpasses all understanding and which will, if we allow it, imbue our lives with meaning. Odd Thomas Odd Interlude #3 (An Odd Thomas Story)

His resiliency was not the resiliency of the dumb but of a lamb who can remember hurt but cannot sustain the anger or the bitterness that brittles the heart.