Dan Groat

Evil stinks and it doesn__ disappear just because you want it to. You can still smell it with your eyes closed.

Evil won__ leave you alone until you take a stand or until you__e dead.

Doing without will wear on you until temptation is stronger than character, sometimes.

Hope was always hard to find in the darkness.

Time does not heal, but it can liberate. A race run well can never be lost.

It__ as close to true freedom as I have come. Not freedom of, but freedom from; freedom from the debris of life that piles up and forces us to dig and dig for our original self, who we were once upon a time, innocent and wonderfully naïve, as authentically pure as a human can be.

He knew that prejudice was a necessary part of the weak spirit of some men.

Memories with laughter are the best ones to keep.

What a wonderful sadness to miss the one you have loved forever, it seems, and know that she is waiting at home.

I am not wise enough to know if there is ever purpose in tragedy, if there is ever virtue in resisting it. If it cannot be overcome, then grief has beaten you, and you are right to say so.

We, the beggar class, have little to lose and our expectations are, at best, modest, and when we suffer, it seems we suffer to the depths, for there is nothing in our lives nor in our souls to buoy our hope. Nothing in the way of the blackness. It sinks to the bottom as the lead weight that is despair. We look forward such a short distance that our spirit is myopic, not to be corrected by any lens within our world.

The bones of the oak tree that had stood by the spring branch during my youth were scattered about the ground, pieces of the skeleton of a majestic life that had passed while I was off growing up and old.

I wonder if God hears prayers if the only time you make them is when you__e in trouble.

Sometimes, you need to spit stuff out in words to get it better arranged in your head. I figure if you never talk about it, it just picks its own spot and lays there and festers.

Being tough today might cause you to be weak in the future.

As an adult I had mastered the art of looking without seeing and listening without hearing and eating without tasting and maybe even existing without living.

It__ a funny thing, one day you__e living and the next day you__e not sometimes, whether you have plans or not. Wishes and wants get trumped by the reaper every time. I don__ even know if I would want a warning if it was my time. I think I__ rather be surprised.

As you get older, you have to be willing and able to choose your own path for your life. And once you choose it, you walk it with strength. If you meet evil along the way, know that it is supposed to make you afraid, but it__ not supposed to stop you. You walk through the fear and you walk through the evil, and you don__ let either one become your master.