“There are no explanations for human evil. Only excuses.”
“Hunches [are] just messages from the subconscious, which [is] thinking furiously all the time and processing information we have not consciously noted.”
“But victimhood was seductive, a release from responsibility and caring. Fear would be transmuted into weary resignation; failure would no longer generate guilt but, instead, would spawn a comforting self-pity.”
“Human cruelty and treachery surpassed all understanding. There were no answers. Only excuses.”
“Even if God exists, does He know that you do?”
“Much of her life had been lived like a balancing act on a spearpoint fence, and on a particularly difficult night when she was twelve, she had decided that instinct was, in fact, the quiet voice of God. Prayers did receive replies, but you had to listen closely and believe in the answer. At twelve, she wrote in her diary: "God doesn't shout; He whispers, and in the whisper is the way.”
“Not all or even most suffering is at the hands of fate; it befalls us at our invitation.”
“She'd been acutely aware that terror, betrayal, and cruelty had a human face, but she had not sufficiently appreciated that courage, kindness, and love had a human face as well.”
“Sometimes, just trying was a triumph.”
“God does not shout; He whispers, and in that whisper is the way." Chyna Shepard in "Intensity”
“Power is living while others inevitably perish. Power is cool indifference to their suffering. Power is taking nourishment from the deaths of others, just as the mighty redwoods draw sustenance from the perpetual decomposition of what once lived, but lived only briefly, around them. This is also part of the philosophy of Edgler Foreman Vess.”
“The sole purpose of existence is to open oneself to sensation and to satisfy all appetites as they arise.”
“she’d known that being a victim was often a choice people made.”
“Chyna Shepherd, untouched and alive and able to pee.”
“She was reduced to the dependency of an infant, too terrified of life itself to find solace anywhere but in the familiar succoring breast and in the sound of that same heartbeat remembered from the womb.”
“Now he must deal with the security system, which has recorded everything that he's done. A video camera is mounted over the front door and focused on the cashiers' counter. Edgler Foreman Vess has no desire to see himself on television news. Living with intensity is virtually impossible when one is in prison.”
“She wasn’t clay in the hands of others; she was rock, and with her own determined hands, she could sculpt the person that she wanted to be.”
“The normality of the house terrified her: the gleaming surfaces, the tidiness, the homey touches, the sense that a person lived here who might walk in daylight on any street and pass for human in spite of the atrocities that he had committed.”
“Hope wasn't a cottage industry; it was neither a product that she could manufacture like needlepoint samplers nor a substance she could secrete, in her cautious solitude, like a maple tree producing the essence of syrup. Hope was to be found in other people, by reaching out, by taking risks, by opening her fortress heart.”
“It is the purpose for which we exist. This reckless caring.”
“victimhood was seductive, a release from responsibility and caring: Fear would be transmuted into weary resignation; failure would no longer generate guilt but, instead, would spawn a comforting self-pity.”
“She’d been living in a prison since the day she’d been born, even after leaving her mother, a prison of fear and shame and lowered expectations, and she’d been so accustomed to her circumscribed life that she had not recognized the bars.”
“The value of any experience isn’t in its positive or negative effect on his life but in the sheer luminous power of it, the vividness, the ferocity, the amount and degree of pure sensation that it provides. Intensity.”
“If coincidence can give, it can take.”
“She wasn’t clay in the hands of others; she was rock, and with her own determined hands, she could sculpt the person that she wanted to be. She”
“Echoing off the tile walls, the sizzle-splash of the falling water sounded like the hissing of serpents and the brittle laughter of strange children.”
“A truly nice smile combined with self-control can take a person a long way.”
“On the first of July, while Ariel sat on their blanket, gazing out at the sun-spangled water, Chyna tried to read a newspaper, but every story distressed her. War, rape, murder, robbery, politicians spewing hatred from all ends of the political spectrum. She read a movie review full of vicious ipse dixit criticism of the director and screenwriter, questioning their very right to create, and then turned to a woman columnist’s equally vitriolic attack on a novelist, none of it genuine criticism, merely venom, and she threw the paper in a trash can.”
“Asshole.” “Your mother never taught you words like that.” “You don’t know my mother,” she said thickly.”
“There are plenty of good reasons for fighting,' I said, 'but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It's that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive.”
“Only by being prepared for your death can you ever truly live. ”
“It’s ridiculous, when I think about it. How did I find myself here? I wonder where it started, my decline; I wonder at what point I could have halted it. Where did I take the wrong turn?”
“The Somebody Else's Problem field is much simpler and more effective, and what's more can be run for over a hundred years on a single torch battery. This is because it relies on people's natural disposition not to see anything they don't want to, weren't expecting, or can't explain.”
“The shadow pulled away, moving forward quickly. My first instinct screamed Arum and to push away from it. I reached blindly for the obsidian necklace, realizing too late I didn’t have it anymore.
“You’re still having nightmares,” the shadow said.
At the sound of the familiar voice, fear gave way to rage so potent that it tasted like a battery acid. I was on my feet before I knew it.
“Blake,” I spat.”
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