“I'm starting to think paradise isn't eternal contentment. It's more like there's something eternal about feeling contented. There's no such thing as eternal life, because you're never going to outr...”

“Their marriages had been Old Testament, hers a matter of honoring her covenant with Charles, Tom's a matter of fearing Anabel's wrath and judgement. In the New Testament, the only things that matte...”

“[P]art of having a complicated mind was understanding its limits, understanding that it couldn't think of everything. Stupidity mistook itself for intelligence, whereas intelligence knew its own st...”

“There's the imperative to keep secrets, and the imperative to have them known. How do you know that you're a person, distinct from other people? By keeping certain things to yourself. You guard the...”

“It's nice to be able to control my smell environment, and I can hear myself think better when it's quiet. It wasn't easy to become a person who's OK being alone on a Saturday night, but I did the w...”

“In terms of having an experience, seriously contemplating a murder was almost as good as going through with it, and it had the added benefit of not entailing risk. Between prison and no prison, no ...”

“Hope is a helium balloon. It is a wish lantern set out into the dark sky of night.”

“Being forgiven is like having all the worst bits of yourself stuffed into a balloon and then having that balloon set free.”

“Up there in the sky.Dont you see him?No, not the moon.The Man in the Moon.He wasnt always a man.Nor was he always on the moon.He was once a child.Like you.Until a battle,a shooting star,and a lost ...”

“When the mind wants to hope it refuses to listen.”

“Sweet are the thoughts that savour of content, The quiet mind is richer than a crown...”

“It turns out that the men who ultimately, who unpretentiously value peace are willing to sacrifice their own peace of mind in order to render it. The question is, 'Who, between opposing forces, wou...”

“It seemed my wholelife was composed of these disjointedfractions of time, hanging around in onepublic place and then another, as if I werewaiting for trains that never came. And, likeone of those g...”

“Stress level: extreme. It's like she was a jar with the lid screwed on too tight, and inside the jar were pickles, angry pickles, and they were fermenting, and about to explode.”