odd-thomas

Recognizing the structure of your psychology doesn't mean that you can easily rebuild it.

Our culture sentimentalizes children, and we forget one of the things that we should most remember from that time of our lives: Children know that this world can be hard on them, harder than it is on adults. They are physically weaker than adults, financially dependent, and in times of danger, nothing clarifies our thinking more than an awareness of our extreme vulnerability.

...the more we learn, the more we realize how much we don't know.

Life had been hard on this girl, Jacob, but she had enough courage for an army.

Remember, there are cookies waiting here for you.

Blood has an oder faint but distinct, of conceit and modesty, of courage and cowardice, of charity and greed, of faith and doubt, in short the fragrance of what we might have been and the smell of what we are...

Acknowledge your fear, odd one. Fearlessness is for the insane and the arrogant. You are neither. Those who rely on you for their lives will be well served only if you fear what you should fear. You are a unique soul, a child of grace, but you can still fail yourself and others.

If an eighty-six-year-old woman has been clear-seeing from a young age, she will have gone through a lot of life developing a keen eye for snares and pitfalls, an ear for deceit, and a good nose for knavery. And by such an age, a smart woman with no illusions is one to whom courage comes far more readily than it does to those young people who don't yet know the world for what it is.

Living in a monastery, even as a guest rather than a monk, you have more opportunities than you might have elsewhere to see the world as it is, instead of through the shadow that you cast upon it.

Knowing the names of things is a way to pay respect to the beauty of the world...

A broken thing can't fix itself.

It's a world of sorrow, Oddie, because we make it so.

It's immeasurably easier to live in a world that's all surfaces, that means nothing and demands nothing of you.

Even if there are moments during the day when all seems normal and when every action of your own and of those around you seems to be unremarkable, the appearance of ordinariness is an illusion, and just below the placid surface, the world is seething.

A sixth sense is a miraculous thing, which in itself suggests a supernatural order. The human intellect, however, for all its power and triumphs, is largely formed by this world and is therefore corruptible.

And because we have been given thought, will, and imagination, albeit on a human scale, we too have this power to create.

Then perhaps you shouldn't sleep. The imagination has terrifying power.

Strange how the deepest part of us isn't able to speak more clearly to the part of us that lives only here in the shallows of the world.