What the Night Knows

All these girls swooning over hunky vampires, what they really want is to give away their freedom, to be controlled and told what to do and not have to think -- and never die, of course. It's sick is what it is. I don't want to be a forever-young living corpse.

Time doesn’t, as advertised, heal all wounds. Although the wrenching immediacy of grief eventually passed, the settled sorrow that replaced it might in its own way be even more intense.

Sometimes it seemed that the human heart, this side of Eden, feared life more than death, light more than darkness, freedom more than surrender.

If a girl wasn't loved a little bit, without the depth of affection that might at least be mistaken for love, she was being used, and no one was the better for being used

What year these events transpired is of no consequence. Where they occured is not important. The time is always, and the place is everywhere.

Fact: No matter how smart and courageous and well-intentioned you are, there's always a chance that you would not become the person you envisioned yourself being, because your own mind or body could fail you.

Her mother said that three great powers kept the universe going. The first and the strongest was God. Each of the two additional powers was as strong as the other: love and imagination. OF the three, God and love were always good. Imagination, however, could be good or bad. Mozart imagined great music into existence. Hitler imagined death camps and built them. Imagination was so powerful that you had to be careful because you could imagine things into existence that you might regret, Everything in the universe was an idea before it was real.

the divine has taken a few steps back from humankind, perhaps in revulsion, perhaps because we don't deserve to look directly upon holy beings anymore.... When the divine enters the world these days from outside of time, it manifests discreetly through children and animals.

Imagination was so powerful that you had to be careful because you could imagine things into existence that you might regret.

Roosevelt was right when he said that we have nothing to fear itself. And our fear can only consume us when we face it alone.

He would pray...for everyone who knew pain, which meant everyone who wore a human face.

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.

While he watched, the phenomenon diminished. The whirl of leaves settled, and the night grew still once more. As the last leaves floated to rest on the grass, John thought he heard a familiar sigh of pleasure, one he hadn’t heard for a long time. If this had been a ghost, it had been a blithe spirit. Filled with sudden wonder, remembering their golden retriever that had died two years earlier, John whispered, “Willard?

Naomi doubted that any human being really understood math, they simply all pretended to have it down pat, when in truth they were every bit as confused by it as she was. Math was nothing but a giant hoax, and everyone participated in it, everyone faked belief in math so they could be done with hideous classes and the drudgery of the hateful homework and get on with life. The sun came up every morning, so the sun was real, and every time you inhaled you got the air you needed, so the atmosphere was obviously real, but half the time when you tried to use math to solve the simplest problem, the math absolutely would not work, which meant that it couldn't be real like the sun and the atmosphere. Math was a waste of time.

If he permitted his imagination to paint a gloss of evil on all things, he would provide camouflage for true evil. Besides, if you painted the devil on the walls often enough, you got the devil on the stairs, his footsteps approaching.

The thing most worth praying for was that the moment of the un would come only when you were old and tired and filled to the brim with this life. Too often, that was not the timetable that Destiny had in mind.