The Wolf Gift

Time can tick when there is no clock.

Truth is a risky proposition. It's the nature of mediocre human beings to believe that lies are necessary, that they serve a purpose, that truth is subversive, that candor is dangerous, that the very scaffold of communal life is supported by lies.

Dear God, help me. Do not forget me on this tiny cinder lost in a galaxy that is lost–a heart no bigger than a speck of dust beating, beating against death, against meaninglessness, against guilt, against sorrow.

I will write things, he was thinking. I will write something meaningful and wonderful someday. I can do that. And I'll dedicate it to you because you're the first person who ever made me think I could.

I'm hoping what all sentient beings hope ... that somehow I'm part of something larger than myself, in which I play a role, an actual role that is somehow intended and meaningful.

Oh, if the moon only had a secret, if the moon only held a truth. But the moon was just the moon.

Say what you will to the force that governs the universe. Perhaps we'll call it into being, and it will yet love us as we love it.

Pride is the parent of destruction; pride eats the mind and the heart and the soul alive.

The highest truths a person could discover were rooted in the natural world.

Some mysteries are simply irresistible,” she said. “They have components that alter a life.

Who has a right to tell me I have no gift, no talent, no passion ...' he murmured. 'Why do people say those things to you when youre young? Doesn't seem fair, does it?' 'No, darling, it's not fair,'she said. 'But the mystery is why you listen.

Phil was mumbling that Reuben might become a writer after all and writers had a way of "redeeming everything that ever happens to them.

...what was the good of being a movie werewolf? You howled at the moon; you couldn't remember what you did, and then somebody shot you.

But all morality is of necessity shaped by context. I'm not talking relativism, no. To ignore the context of a decision is in fact immoral.

God, what is it like to be You and hear all those people all the time everywhere, begging, imploring, calling out for anything and anyone?

You are alone when something like this happens. Doesn't matter how many people love you and want to help you. You are alone. When Marchent died, she was alone.

He was so excited by this little bit of intelligence that he might have gone off, perplexed, pondering for a long time. It was like reading a wonderful sentence in a book, and not being able to continue because so many possibilities were crowding his mind.

Thank God he killed the guy. Oh, now, wait a minute. What kind of a prayer was that!

He had never expected death to be this quiet, this secretive, this easy.

Wasn't it his right to listen to opera, read poetry and adventure novels, go to Europe every couple of months for some reason or another, and drive his Porsche over the speed limit until he found out who he was?

I think all of us ordinary mortals tend to mythologize people as good-looking as you.

There's a virtue,' Felix said, 'to listening to a reluctant storyteller. You know that he is in fact diving deep for the salvageable truth.

When we talk about our lives, long or short, brief and tragic or enduring beyond comprehension, we impose a continuity on them, and that continuity is a lie.

Garden of Pain, I need you. What were the songs of beasts to the cries of sentient souls?

Our way–the Western Way–has always been a "work in progress." Questions of life and death, good and evil, justice and tragedy–these are never definitively settled, but must be addressed again and again as personal and public worlds shift and change. We hold our morals to be absolutes, but the context of our actions and decisions is forever changing. We are not relativists because we seek to re-evaluate again and again our most crucial moral positions.

But even those people, cops, lawyers, doctors, learned what they learned from the aftermath. They weren't there when the killer tore at his victim; they didn't smell the scent of evil; they didn't hear the cries to heaven for something, someone, to intervene.

If drugs really numb your consciousness, they'd be a good thing. As it was, they slowed you down, confused you, kept you vulnerable to violent flashes of recall, and then agitated you and made you unsure of what you knew and didn't know.

Hoping for something is not the same as expecting it.

Laura remarked that science was dependent upon poetry, that all scientific description was metaphoric.