Best 195 quotes in «odd thomas quotes» category

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 can't allow myself to be wary of one place merely because it reminds me of another place where I almost died, because just about every place reminds me of another place...

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.

I'd had much practice turning my mind away from certain memories of my childhood. I could quickly dial her remembered voice from a whisper to a silence.

I don't know if this deception qualified as a half-step down the slippery slope. I had no sensation of sliding. But of course we never notice the descent until we're rocketing along at high velocity.

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 a keen 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 illusions 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 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.

I feel like I've been sliding all day.

I needed a moment to understand that I'd been dreaming, that I had come awake, and another moment to remember where I had gone to bed.

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.

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.

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

I knew that suffering can purify, that it's a kind of fire that can be worth enduring, but there were degrees of it to which I chose not to subject myself.

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.

I never knew whether I was drawn to eccentric people or if they were drawn to me.

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

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

In this world where too many are willing to see only the light that is visible, never the Light Invisible, we have a daily darkness that is night, and we encounter another darkness from time to time that is death, the deaths of those we love, but the third and most constant darkness is with us everyday, at all hours of every day, is the darkness of the mind, the pettiness and meanness and hatred, which we have invited into ourselves, and which we pay out with generous interest.

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.

In twenty-one years, I have not considered changing to Todd. The bizarre course of my life suggests that Odd is more suited to me, whether it was conferred by my parents with intention or fate.

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

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.

I suspect she must speak without emotion or otherwise entirely lose the self-control that is required to speak to me at all.

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 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

It's immeasurably easier to live in a world that's all surfaces, that means nothing and demands nothing of you.

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 was the worst kind of fool. When I look back on that August night, changed forever by all my wounds and all my suffering, that undamaged Odd Thomas seems like a different human being from me, immeasurably more confident than I am now, still able to hope, but not as wise, and I mourn for him.

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

I was like a thought slipping through the fissures...

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

Living in a monastery, even as a guest rather than a monk, you have more opportunities than you might have elsewhere to see the world as it is, instead of through the shadow that you cast upon it.

Life had been hard on this girl, Jacob, but she had enough courage for an army.

Maybe if everything was beautiful, nothing would be.

Money and beauty are defenses against the sorrows of this world but neither can undo the past. Only time will conquer time. The way forward is the only way back to innocence and to peace.

Mr. Thomas, did you know that in an experiment with a human observer, subatomic particles behave differently from the way they behave when the experiment is observed while in progress and the results are examined, instead, only after the fact?" "Sure. Everybody knows that." He raised one bushy eyebrow. "Everybody, you say. Well then you realize what this signifies." I said, "At least on an subatomic level, human will can in part shape reality.

More likely, they would just cease to exist." "That's death." "No, it's different. Death leaves a corps.

Most people desperately desire to believe that they are a part of a great mystery, that Creation is a work of grace and glory, not merely the result of random forces colliding. Yet each time that they are given but one reason to doubt, a worm in the apple of the heart makes them turn away from a thousand proofs of the miraculous, whereupon they have a drunkard's thirst for cynicism, and they feed upon despair as a starving man upon a loaf of bread.

Mr. Thomas, any scientist will tell you that in nature many systems appear to be chaotic, but when you study them long enough and closely enough, strange order always underlies the appearance of chaos.

My imagination is as rich as my bank account is empty.

Not everything that happens during the day is an open portending a good or evil development in the future, but everything has meaning to one degree or another, for the world is an ever-weaving tapestry from which no thread can be pulled without destroying the integrity of the cloth. The breadth of Creation makes it impossible for us to step back far enough to see the story that the tapestry tells; the intricacy of it, from the macro to the micro to the subatomic, make sit impossible for us to comprehend the megatrillions of connections between the threads in just one small fragment of the whole.

My only armor is my belief that life has meaning...

Narcissists are everywhere in this ripe age of self-love, which amazes me because so much in life would seem to foster humility.