Best 195 quotes in «odd thomas quotes» category

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'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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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 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 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.

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

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

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 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.

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

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...

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

My instinct is a winning coach, and when it said "Batter up,"I didn't argue that I wasn't ready for the game. I gripped the bat in both hands, assumed the stance, and said a prayer to Mickey Mantle.

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.

Nothing before its time, son. Everything in its own time, to its own schedule.

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

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.

Nothing supernatural has ever harmed me. My wounds and losses have all be at the hands of human beings...

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

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.

Not immediately able to proceed, I stood there, inexpressibly grateful that my life, for all its terrors, is so filled with moments of grace.

On a small table beside his chair were other haphazardly stacked volumes by such poets as Emerson, Whitman, and Wallace Stevens, a dangerous crew to let into your head.

...on a subconscious level we're aware that time isn't enduring, that it is not a required condition of our existence, that there comes a point when we will have no need of it.

Once, there were no predators, no prey. Only harmony. There were no quakes, no storms, everything in balance. In the beginning, time was all at once and forever — no past, present, and future, no death. We broke it all.

Our culture sentimentalizes children, and we forget one of the things that we should most remember from that time of our lives: Children know that this world can be hard on them, harder than it is on adults. They are physically weaker than adults, financially dependent, and in times of danger, nothing clarifies our thinking more than an awareness of our extreme vulnerability.

On the third, directly before me, were embedded more polished letters: PER OMNIA SAECULA SAECULORUM. For ever and ever. In the red light, the brushed steel glowed softly, like embers. The polish letters blazed. Without a hiss, For ever and ever slid aside, as though inviting me to eternity.

Patterns exist in our seemingly patternless lives, and the most common pattern is the circle.

Pico Mundo is a prosperous town. But no degree of prosperity can be sufficient to eliminate all misfortune, and sloth is impervious to opportunity.

Quantum theory tells us, Mr. Thomas, that every point in the universe is intimately connected to every other point, regardless of apparent distance. In some mysterious way, any point on a planet in a distant galaxy is as close to me as you are.