Quotes about odd-thomas

...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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Hope, love, and faith are in the waiting

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.

Be you and only you, which means be you and all the people you have loved...

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

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

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

Denial couldn't be maintained.

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.

A part of me knew... from the moment I saw herher death would have been one wound too many that day.

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.

Three more words. Be happy. Persevere.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

What we fear too much we often bring to pass.

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.

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

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.

Every journey has a destination, known or unknown.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Ambition and stupidity are a dangerous combination.

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

...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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Remember, there are cookies waiting here for you.

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.

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.

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...

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

A broken thing can't fix itself.

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.

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.

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.

Do not doubt the beauty of your heart.

Whatever happens here, trust your heart. It's as true as any compass.

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.

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.

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

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

Virtue is imaginative, evil repetitive.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

The less I have, the less I can lose.

When I was no longer of the world, I would miss its extravagant beauty. I would miss the complex and charming layers of subterfuge by which the truth of the world's mysteries were withheld from us even as we were tantalized and enchanted by them. I would miss the kindness of good people who were compassionate when so many were pitiless, who made their way through so much corruption without being corrupted themselves, who eschewed envy in a world of envy, who eschewed greed in a world of greed, w

Translating the words on the door, he said, "Light from light." "Waste and void, waste and void. Darkness on the face of the deep," I said. "Then God commanded light. The light of the world descends from the Everlasting Light that is God.""That is surely one thing it means," said Romanovich. "Bit it may also mean that the visible can be born from the invisible, That matter can arise from energy that thought is a form of energy and that thought itself can be concretized into the very object that