When we make our own misery we sometimes cling to it even when we want so bad to change, because misery is something we know. The misery is comfortable.
Change isn’t easy. Changing the way you live means changing the way you think, means changing what you believe about life. That’s hard.
Fate isn’t one straight road…there are forks in it, many different routes to different ends. We have the free will to choose the path.
In this age, lies were the universal lubricant of the culture. A love of Truth and commitment to it were seldom rewarded and were often punished.
What doesn’t quicken dies. That’s an indisputable truth of life.
You won’t find the truth of life in morbidity, only in hope.
People hide truths about themselves from themselves. Such self-deception is a coping mechanism, and to one extent or another, most people begin deceiving themselves when they’re children.
You can con God and get away with it, Granny said, if you do so with charm and wit. If you live your life with imagination and verve, God will play along just to see what outrageously entertaining thing you’ll do next.
Of course, in the process, you must never do harm to others in any serious way, or you’ll cease to amuse Him. Then payment comes due for promises you didn’t keep.
For the likes of you, the path to happiness is one mean son of a bitch of a path.
No one can grant you happiness. Happiness is a choice we all have the power to make.
Home was not a perfect place. But it was the only home they had and they could hope to make it better.
Imagine that you are more than nothing. Evil made you, but you are no more evil than a child unborn. If you want, if you seek, if you hope, who is to say that your hope might not be answered?
What will happen will happen. There is time for miracles until there is no more time, but time has no end.
For a long time things were so bad. Very bad. Dark even when there was light.The only thing that kept the dark back was the Forever Shiny Thing that was her secret…It is a word…the word hangs on a silver chain. The word is HOPE.
A man begins dying at the moment of his birth. Most People live in denial of Death’s patient courtship until, late in life and deep in sickness, they become aware of him sitting bedside.
Being alone can be good. It’s easy to find peace alone. But sometimes, being alone is a king of death.
How obvious can it be? … The purpose of makeup is to defy the degradations of time, and time is just a synonym for death.
To many people, free will is a license to rebel not against what is unjust or hard in life but against what is best for them and true.
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.
She was fascinated with words. To her, words were things of beauty, each like a magical powder or potion that could be combined with other words to create powerful spells.
In a book, even the real bastards can’t hurt you. And you can never loose a friend you make in a book. When you get to a sad part, no one’s there to see you cry. Or wonder why you don’t cry when you should.
A fine line separates the weary recluse from the fearful hermit. Finer still is the line between hermit and bitter misanthrope.
Then what are you? An electronic Hannibal Lector? You can’t eat my liver with fava beans through a modem, you know.
In spite of where we were, how we had gotten here and why we had come, I felt that at this moment of our lives, this place was exactly where we belonged. We were not drifting but rising, rising toward something right and of significance.
Never leave a friend behind. Friends are all we have to get us through this life–and they are the only things from this world that we could hope to see in the next.
Every expression of desired friendship has potential bite. Every smile reveals the teeth.
Tommy and Scootie locked eyes. Only minutes ago, he wouldn’t have believed that he could ever have felt such a kinship with the Labrador as he felt now.
people have a natural tendency to anthropomorphize their pets, to ascribe human perceptions and intentions to the animal where none exist
He once told me that an August evening was “as hot as three toads in a Cuisinart,” a comparison that left me blinking two days later.
He’s got a chloroform-soaked rag in one hand, and before Judy realizes what’s happening, the dude is all over her like fat on cheese.
It’s so damn hard to bloom… to change. Even when you want to change, want it more than anything in the world, it’s hard. Desire to change isn’t enough. Or desperation. Couldn’t be done without…love,
…what makes humanity beautiful is our free will, our individuality, our endless striving in spite of our imperfection.BY THE LIGHT OF THE MOONChapter 27 Page 214
Pain can be endured and defeated only if it is embraced. Denied or feared, it grows in perception if not in reality. The best response to terror is righteous anger, confidence in ultimate justice, a refusal to be intimidated.
He would pray…for everyone who knew pain, which meant everyone who wore a human face.
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.
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.
She never had much in this life, but with the simplest things, she made her corner of the world as beautiful as any king’s palace. We may lack riches, but the greatest fortune is what lies in our hearts.
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
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.
Each book is a mind alive, a life revealed, a world awaiting exploration, but living people are all those things, as well—and more, because their stories haven’t yet been completely told.
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.
…it will be a world made not bright but brighter, not clean but cleaner.
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.
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.
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.
…the more we learn, the more we realize how much we don’t know.
We make so many of our own troubles, from mere mishaps to disasters, by dwelling on the possibility of them until the possible becomes inevitable.
Human beings not only can’t bear too much reality, we flee from reality when someone doesn’t force us close enough to the fire to feel the heat on our faces.
In his mind he saw them standing with the tips of their organs pressed together ejaculating into each other’s penis.
If you’re going to keep the music in you, Jonah, you’ve got to play a little bit every day purely for pleasure. Otherwise, you’ll lose the joy of it, and if you lose the joy, you won’t sound good to those who know piano – or to yourself.
Most people regarded Psychology as a science. Some called it a soft science, but those making such a distinction grew fewer by the year.
Recognizing the structure of your psychology doesn’t mean that you can easily rebuild it.
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.
The dead can be even more frustrating to deal with than are many of the living, which is astonishing when you consider it’s the living who run the Department of Motor Vehicles.
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.
Nothing before its time, son. Everything in its own time, to its own schedule.
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.
My only armor is my belief that life has meaning…
Are you one of those people who uses words more for the sound than for the sense of them?
Words are the wellspring of the world, and language is the most powerful weapon in the ancient and still unfolding war between truth and lies.
By doing, I learn what to do. By going, I learn where to go. One day, by dying, I’ll learn how to die, and leave the world and hope to land in light.
So many things in my continuing education are learned by going where I have to go and doing what I have to do. Therefore, my only answer is: “I guess I’ll find out.
If there’s nothing to learn because we know it all, what’s the challenge? Why would the effort matter? What would be the point? – Odd Thomas
Out of sight above the house, the mirror moon reflected the sun of a day not yet dawned, shining the pale light of tomorrow on the yard and on the paper birches.
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.
Such grief might be to them quite delicious, a delicacy.
He lives vividly in her recollections, however, and his memory is etched on her soul.
The secret is not to think, we think in words. And what lies beyond the reality we see is a truth that words can’t contain, the secret is to feel.
My imagination is as rich as my bank account is empty.
If one’s friends do not openly laugh at him, they are not in fact his friends.
You be careful, Wizard. Interestingly eccentric friends aren’t easy to find.
In memory, she lived and moved and laughed, but all that a photograph could offer was one frozen moment of a life.
Maybe magic and love, together, can achieve what magic alone cannot.
You can’t fix things with a hug, but you can’t make them any worse either.
Beauty that steals the heart is often imperfect, suggests grace and kindness, and inspires tenderness more than it incites lust.
I was like a thought slipping through the fissures…
He wondered why it was easier to believe in a malevolent spirit than in a benign one. Sometimes it seemed that the human heart, this side of Eden, feared eternal life more than death, light more than darkness, freedom more than surrender.
Were you always such a snake,” the child asked, “or did you grow into what you are?
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 am sustained by the certainty that life has meaning. As does death.
She has suffered so much, and that sorrows me. But she has been strong in the face of unthinkable adversity, and that inspires me.
Her stare was direct and unwavering, full of confidence earned from painful experience…
Life without meaningcannot be borne.We find a missionto which we’re sworn–or answer the callof Death’s dark horn.Without a gleaningof purpose in life,we have no vision,we live in strife,–or let blood fallon a suicide knife.
We don’t have time for such uncertainty because it reliably breeds indecision, and indecision is one of the mothers of failure.
Too much mystery is merely an annoyance. Too much adventure is exhausting. And a little terror goes a long way.
…because wonder admits to the existence of mystery, and the recognition of mystery in the world allows the possibility of Truth.
Narcissists are everywhere in this ripe age of self-love, which amazes me because so much in life would seem to foster humility.
To protect the innocent, to avoid being one of Burke’s good men who do nothing, you have to accept permanent scars that cincture the heart and traumas of the mind that occasionally reopen to weep again.
Humanity is a parade of fools, and I am at the front of it, twirling a baton.
Chyna Shepherd, untouched and alive and able to pee.
If you have to pay the bills, and you write something you’re not proud of, use a pen-name for that.
Hand-to-hand combat with three hundred pounds of screaming monkey menace is not my idea of a fair fight. My idea of a fair fight is one unarmed, toothless, nearsighted old monkey versus me with a Blackhawk attack helicopter.
Darkness dwells within even the best of us. In the worst of us, darkness not only dwells but reins.
Some mysteries bite and barkand come to get you in the dark.
Darkness doesn’t fall at a predictable schedule. Darkness can overwhelm you any time of the day, as you know well.
There is in me a darkness that, by darkness challenged, will rise up and have its way.
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.
Not immediately able to proceed, I stood there, inexpressibly grateful that my life, for all its terrors, is so filled with moments of grace.
…I stood there, inexpressibly grateful that my life, for all its terrors, is so filled with moments of grace.
A grace is a thing you get from God, you use it to make a better world, or not use it, you have to choose.
Loyal companions are an unequaled grace, stanching fear before it bleeds you numb, a reliable antidote for creeping despair.
We are all the walking wounded in a world that is a war zone. Everything we love will be taken from us, everything, last of all life itself. Yet everywhere I look, I find great beauty in this battlefield, and grace and the promise of joy.
What really holds their marriage together are mutual respect of an awesome depth, a shared sense of humor, faith that they were brought together by a force greater than themselves, and a love so unwavering and pure that it is sacred.
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.
You can change the road you take, but sometimes it can bend back to lead you straight to that same stubborn fate.
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.
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.
There is no fate, only free will, and we were just in the way of other people’s free will when they decided to do the Devil’s work.
Evil was coming. I wondered whose face it would be wearing.
Evil travels the world in anonymity, its presence revealed only by the periodic consequences of its desires…
…guilt is deserved only when the effort to resist evil is never made.
We need to laugh at the irrationality of evil, for in doing so we deny evil’s power over us, diminish its influence in the world, and tarnish the allure it has for some people.
The world needed a little Evil, so Good had something to compare itself to, but you couldn’t let it think it had the right-of-way on the road and an invitation to dinner.
Either the gates of hell had opened, or Tom had lost his mind; for there could be nothing like this entity outside the precincts of the damned, except in the fevered fantasies of a raving paranoid psychopath
Laser beams slid around them, spurts of light sinking through the darkness, eventually touching the stars or lighting the water for a moment on their death ride to the murky bottom.
Hell of a thing to have to experience, hell of a thing to have to see, to be reminded you’re a human being and all it meant to be one.
We ate food that wasn’t healthy. We let dirty dishes stack up in the sink. We slept too much.We talked about everything, everything but the slaughter at the mall. Our past, our future. We planned. We dreamed.
Your this beautiful ship that will sail a long way, and I’d only be your anchor””A ship without an anchor can never be at rest
The uniqueness of every soul is not a theme that our current culture, obsessed with group identities, cares to assert.
But the line between moral behavior and narcissistic self-righteousness is thin and difficult to discern
I can explain why I have to do what I’m about to do, but I’m acutely aware that an explanation is not a righteous justification. What’s bad is bad even if necessary.
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.
He considered razing the house and rebuilding, but he realized that houses are not haunted, and regardless of the architecture with which we surround ourselves,our ghosts stay with us until we ourselves are ghosts.
It was one of those rare times when remembering the dead was more inmportant than tending to the needs of the living.
You’re a poster boy for sincerity. You have all the guile of a lamb.
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.
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.
Some people like to hear themselves talk, but I like to hear myself silent.
…in an infinite universe, anything that could be imagined might somewhere exist.
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.
As I turned to leave the tent, she said, “Don’t worry. Your own mother wouldn’t know you.”I said, “She never has.
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.
..the most identifying trait of humanity is our ability to be inhumane to one another.
Maybe the devil in human beings isn’t the reflection of the devil, perhaps the devil is only a reflection of the savagery and brutality of our kind. Maybe what we’ve done is create the devil in our own image
I suspect she must speak without emotion or otherwise entirely lose the self-control that is required to speak to me at all.
In self-defense and in defense of the innocent, cowardice is the only sin.
As we passed his table, I saw that the device that imprisoned the book was clever but wicked-looking, as though the critic were holding the work – and it’s author – in bondage.
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.
Stay low, stay quiet, keep it simple, don’t expect too much, enjoy what you have.
There’s no tragedy in nature, only process — and therefore no triumph, either.
I don’t desire a change of scenery or exotic experiences. My heart yearns for familiarity, stability, the comfort of home — and my sanity depends on it.
I don’t desire a change of scenery or exotic experiences. My heart yearns for familiarity, stability, the comfort of home- and my sanity depends on it.
All she wanted was love with respect, respect was so important to her, and I could give her that.
To get through life successfully, body and soul must translate each other correctly more often than not.
I’ve been badly scared myself, badly, for quite a few years now. You learn to live with it.
As a writer, Bibi, you could be a doctor of the soul.
I survive by finding the sweet spot between reason and unreason, between the rational and irrational.
Unreason is an essential medicine as long as you do not overdose.
…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.
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.
From their perspective, however, torture might make a sort of cockeyed sense if it was ritualistic, part of a ceremony that this fraternity of the demented required of themselves when they murdered one of their own.
Life, Stormy says, is not about how fast you run or even with what degree of grace. It’s about perseverance, about staying on your feet and slogging forward no matter what.
Perseverance is impossible if we don’t permit ourselves to hope.
Although enlightened people know that an extreme phobia wasn’t a form of madness, hey could not help but regard it as odd.
Holy men tell us life is a mystery.They embrace that concept happily.But some mysteries bite and barkand come to get you in the dark.
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.
Now, sprawled comfortably in his motel bed, Anson Sharp enjoyed the sleep of the amoral, which is far deeper and more restful than the sleep of the just, the righteous, and the innocent.
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…
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.
Petting, scratching, and cuddling a dog could be as soothing to the mind and heart as deep meditation and almost as good for the soul as prayer.
People scare me more than anything, for I know too well the savagery of which humankind is capable.
If she fully embraced life with all its conflicts, she would suffer a breakdown.
Chronologically she is twelve but emotionally she is older, and intellectually older still.
My life has a mysterious purpose that I don’t understand, and day by day, conflict by conflict, I learn by going where I have to go.
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
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.
Free will,” she agreed, “our greatest gift, the thing that makes life worth living, in spite of all the anguish it brings.
She might have been born this way, without an empathy gene and other essentials. In that case, she would interpret any kindness as weakness. Among predatory beasts, any display of weakness is an invitation to attack.
I’m no more a wonder than anyone. And that’s what makes the world magical. Every baby’s a seed of wonder – that gets watered or it doesn’t.
People existed, however, who believed that closet racist were everywhere around them. They needed to believe this in order to have prupose and meaning in their lives, and to have someone to hate.
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.
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.
None of us can ever save himself; we are the instruments of one another’s salvation, and only by the hope that we give to others do we lift ourselves out of the darkness into light.
Besides, I can’t get to where I want to go by conscious or unconscious suicide. I’ve got my strange little life to lead. Leading it the best I can – that’s how I buy the ticket to where I want to be.
I’m alive but I have no life. I’m alive but also dead. I’m dead and alive.
Jocko likes salty, Jocko likes sweet, but never bring Jocko any hot sauce, like with jalapenos, because it makes Jocko squirt funny-smelling stuff out his ears.
Once you have had a wonderful dog, a life without one, is a life diminished.
After his dinner, the wolfhound liked to prowl the grounds, sniffing the grass to learn what creatures of field and forest had recently visited. The yard was Merlin’s newspaper.
May I tell you a wonderful truth about your dog? … You have been given stewardship of what you in your faith might call a holy soul.
Listen, child—if you’re at a party with a hundred people and one of them is the devil, he’ll be the last one you’d suspect.
There’s no use wasting are energy being afraid of the devils, demons and things that go bump in the night… Because ultimately we’ll never encounter anything more terrifying than the monster among us. Hell is where we make it.
When I function in only one mode or the other, I am denying half myself, half my potential.
Funny how people that don’t believe in nothin’ are so quick to believe every crazy story about people like us.
She says what holds their marriage together is that she feels too damn sorry for him to ask for a divorce.
Nothing supernatural has ever harmed me. My wounds and losses have all be at the hands of human beings…
This time I would choose to err on the side of illogic. I had to trust intuition, and plunge as I had never plunged before, with blind faith.
People who were perfectly sane on Tuesday sometimes go nuts on Wednesday.
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.
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.
People who go to work every day, make sacrifices to raise families, and get through life without hurting other people if they can help it-those are the real heros.
…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.
Quick now, here, now, always, as if we are in a condition of complete simplicity…
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.
Now take my hand and hold it tight.I will not fail you here tonight,For failing you, I fail myselfAnd place my soul upon a shelfIn Hell’s library without light.I will not fail you here tonight.
…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.
…love was the closest thing to immortality that men would ever know and that the only–and best–answer to death is loving. Loving.
…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.
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.
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…
…your life is yours to shape as you wish with free will…
Sometimes you have to break a rule to save the system.
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.
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.
I was looking forward to having a halo. It would make such a convenient reading lamp.
Play hard. Play, play, play like your life depends on it. Because it does.
Like all of us in this storm between birth and death, I can wreak no great changes on the world, only small changes for the better, I hope, in the lives of those I love.
I like to deal with EVERY aspect of our condition, and that means terror and humor in equal mix. Some books have more room for humor than others.
Nothing gives us courage more readily than the desire to avoid looking like a damn fool.
I really believe that everyone has a talent, ability, or skill that he can mine to support himself and to succeed in life.
There’s sometimes a weird benefit to having an alcoholic, violent father. He really motivated me in that I never wanted to be anything like him.