Odd Thomas Quotes - Page 2

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'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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Chronologically she is twelve but emotionally she is older, and intellectually older still.

But with the morning almost gone, with seven bodachs in the recreation room, with living boneyards stalking the storm, with Death opening the door to a luge chute and inviting me to go for a bobsled ride, I didn't have time to put on a victim suit and tell the woeful tale of my sorrowful childhood. Neither time nor the inclination

Hope, love, and faith are in the waiting

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.

Then perhaps you shouldn't sleep. The imagination has terrifying power.

She has suffered so much, and that sorrows me. But she has been strong in the face of unthinkable adversity, and that inspires me.

When I woke up and the dark wasn't gone yet, and the dark seemed so big, then she sang soft and made the dark small again."That is the best of all things we can do for one another: Make the dark small.

A sixth sense is a miraculous thing, which in itself suggests a supernatural order. The human intellect, however, for all its power and triumphs, is largely formed by this world and is therefore corruptible.

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.

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.

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

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

To get through life successfully, body and soul must translate each other correctly more often than not.

Beauty that steals the heart is often imperfect, suggests grace and kindness, and inspires tenderness more than it incites lust.

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.

Three more words. Be happy. Persevere.

Nothing is worse than being alone on the evening of the day when one's cow has exploded.

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.

Although he never speaks of how or what or why, I know that his childhood was difficult, that his parents broke his heart. Books and excess poundage are his insulation against pain.

And because we have been given thought, will, and imagination, albeit on a human scale, we too have this power to create.

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

Denial couldn't be maintained.

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.

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.

With lead he shaded love into the woman's eyes.

Chronologically she is twelve, but emotionally she is older, and intellectually older still.

Her eyes were celadon saucers but bottomless, of such great depth that she could take in the knowledge of whole worlds and have room in that gaze for still more.

I am amazed that there are still nights when I sleep well.

She says that each of us has his or her role in life, and if we know ourselves well enough to understand what that role is, we will be happy doing nothing but what we can do best.

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.

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.

Sometimes it seems that to exit this world, they must go through my heart, leaving me scarred and sore.

Although much that was precious has been taken from me in this life, I have reason to remain an optimist. After the numerous tight scrapes I've been through, by now I should have lost one leg, three fingers, one buttock, most of my teeth, an ear, my spleen, and my sense of fun. But here I am.

In even a clear heart, some righteous acts of the harder kind can stir up a sediment of guilt, but that is not a bad thing. If allowed to be, the heart is self-policing, and a reasonable measure of guilt guards against corruption.

A broken thing can't fix itself.

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.

You can't fix things with a hug, but you can't make them any worse either.

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.

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

There will be something very wrong with any place we go.

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.

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

Recognizing the structure of your psychology doesn't mean that you can easily rebuild it.

These days, all I ask of 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. This is a big request to make of busy Fate, who has billions of lives to keep in constant turmoil.

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.

She said...she said don't be scared, we wasn't born to be all the time scared, we was born happy, babies laugh at everything, we was born happy and to make a better world.

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.

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

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

You do what you have to do. That's who you seem to be to me, anyway. You're one who does what he has to do.

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

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.