Odd Thomas Quotes

Ambition and stupidity are a dangerous combination.

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

She is a girl who feels things strongly, and though cynics might mock her for that, I never will, as it is perhaps the best of graces: to feel deeply, to care profoundly.

The uniqueness of every soul is not a theme that our current culture, obsessed with group identities, cares to assert.

All she wanted was love with respect, respect was so important to her, and I could give her that.

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.

Do not doubt the beauty of your heart.

Some people like to hear themselves talk, but I like to hear myself silent.

So," said the Russian, after regaining is composure, "the lesson of the model is that the universe——all its matter and forms of energy——arise out of thought.

Sometimes enlightenment descends upon you when you least expect it...

The past cannot be redeamed. What has been and what might have been both bring us to what is. To know grief, we must be in the river of time, because grief thrives in the present and promises to be with us in the future until the end point. Only time conquers time and its burdens. There is no grief before or after time, which is all the consolation we should need.

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

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

Virtue is imaginative, evil repetitive.

Sleep is a kind of peace, and I have not yet earned peace.

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

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

When we hope, we usually hope for the wrong thing.We yearn for tomorrow and the progress that it presents. But yesterday was once tomorrow, and where was the progress in it?Or we yearn for yesterday, for what was or what might have been. But as we are yearning, the present is becoming the past, so the past is nothing but our yearning for second chances.

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 striving than in 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.

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

When you laugh at yourself, you gain perspective. Then you realize that the mistakes you made, as long as they didn't hurt anyone but yourself——well, you can forgive yourself for those.

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.

Small-town boy meets big-time evil.

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.

Acknowledge your fear, odd one. Fearlessness is for the insane and the arrogant. You are neither. Those who rely on you for their lives will be well served only if you fear what you should fear. You are a unique soul, a child of grace, but you can still fail yourself and others.

...an age-old patter that seemed like chaos but was not...

...because wherever else the future leads, it leads ultimately to death, the end that is present in my beginning and in yours.

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.

This isn't a reasoned response to a configuration of stars, but the heart cannot flourish on logic alone. Unreason is an essential medicine as long as you don't overdose

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.

But the universe in its immensity is nevertheless of a piece, and what applies at one end of it applies at the other. No doubt misery, like happiness and hope, is found throughout the stars.

Waiting is one of the things that human beings cannot do well, though it is one of the essential things we must do successfully if we are to know happiness. We are impatient for the future and try to craft it with our own powers, but hte future will come as it ocmes and will not be hurried.

Strange how the deepest part of us isn't able to speak more clearly to the part of us that lives only here in the shallows of the world.

Her eyes were clear; she hadn't been crying. She was a cop's wife first, a woman second; she wouldn't give in to tears as long as Wyatt was fighting for his life because she was fighting with him in spirit.

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.

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

When I function in only one mode or the other, I am denying half myself, half my potential.

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

These days, all I ask Fate is that the people she hurls into my life, whether they are evil or good, or morally bipolar, should be amusing to one degree or another.

That I had come full circle shouldn't have surprised me, for we are born into time only to be born out of it, after living through the cycles of the seasons, under stars that turn because the world turns, born into ignorance and acquiring knowledge that ultimately reveals to us our enduring ignorance: The circle is the essential pattern of our existence.

Ah, sir, that's just mean. She's not a Victoria's Secret model. but she's pretty in her way.

Are you one of those people who uses words more for the sound than for the sense of them?

Such grief might be to them quite delicious, a delicacy.

Blood has an oder faint but distinct, of conceit and modesty, of courage and cowardice, of charity and greed, of faith and doubt, in short the fragrance of what we might have been and the smell of what we are...

You are reformed, you may be a better man, but you are not a different man. How can you convince yourself of such a thing when you are so conversant with the theology of your faith? From one end of this life to the other, you carry with you all that you have done. Absolution grants you forgiveness for it, but does not expunge the past. The man you were still lives within you, repressed by the man you have struggled to become.

Every journey has a destination, known or unknown.

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.

We were friends, never paramours. A lover who is enigmatic will most likely prove to be a cataclysm waiting to happen. But a charming friend whose usual warmth is raveled through moments of cool inscrutability can be an intriguing companion.

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

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

What we fear too much we often bring to pass.

...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.

The greatest danger, of course, was to believe that I was equal to them, because assurance can morph into arrogance that Death loves to prove unfounded.

...and where the Ferris wheel carried its passengers high and brought them low and raised them high and brought them low again, as if it were not merely a carnival ride but also a metaphor for the basic pattern of human experience.

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

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

The less I have, the less I can lose.

...up to no good—and pleased about it.

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