"I've known some bad people and some good people in my life, and it's the bad ones who live in fear, all the time. Cause they know their own hearts... And they think everyone else is just waiting to pull the same moves on them that they've got planned to pull on somebody else."

"You as stupid as they come. Of course, I say this with your best interests at heart. Most people are stupid. I don't hold it against them."

"Knowing was better than not knowing. But not by much."

"She going to be free now. She can go home to Jesus. Call me selfish, but I wanted her to go home with me."

"I'm nobody's child. You're mine now. Not my child, but mine, to miss you when you go, to look out for you, to hope you'll be careful."

"You aren't the kind of guy who takes the law into his own hands. You left the law in other hands and it screwed you over pretty badly."

"I believed all that stuff about pleasing myself. Can't be done. You can't please yourself by doing what you want. Because it doesn't mean anything if it's just you. There has to be somebody it matters to."

"She never seemed to get near the edge. She lived on other people's edges. And when they fell off, she'd admire how pretty they looked as they fell."

"We're not a family. We're the opposite of a family. We're people so lonely that when we're together we make a black hole of loneliness and everything else gets sucked down into it and is never seen again."

"Why is doubt the one thing we're never skeptical of? We question other peoples' beliefs, and the more sure they are the more we doubt them. But it never occurs to us to doubt our own doubt. Question our own questions. We think our questions are answers."

"Why do you bother asking, when you know the answer and you also know that you don't intend to believe it?"

"Something had been given back to him. And because [she] had been a part of it, there was something between them now. A bond of loss, if loss could bind."

"How could you tell, when utter honesty and cynical manipulation would each account completely for the things she said and did?"

"Maybe she just wanted to be the one to decide when things happened between them. Then again, what women didn't want to decide that?"

"That was the most terrible thing that a woman could [??] to a decent man: look vulnerable and ask him for mercy. If he refused her he'd be denying all his instincts as a provider and protector."

"She got out of the car in a smooth motion that [he] found attractive precisely because it did not seem designed to make men watch her do it."

"He was wild the way a mistreated dog becomes wild, not because it loves freedom, but because it has lost trust."

"This man, though, was of that rare type that knew what he wanted but didn't want anything badly enough to demand it or beg for it or hurt anyone else in the process of getting it."

"It is the downfall of evil, that it never sees far enough ahead."

"It never occurred to you that they might be flattering you, because you don't lie."

"Some people can't see miracles when they're right in the middle of them. Better than seeing miracles that don't exist. You're determined to stand entirely alone, aren't you? That's where I've always stood."

"To be cut off from the land of the living, and yet not to be dead. How could I bear that? That's how most men live, and don't even know it."

"Self-knowledge can be painful, but not half so damaging as self-ignorance."

"God had answered her prayer, not with the thing she asked for, but rather the thing she wanted most in her heart."

"The man who has an intelligent child is doomed to spend his life justifying every decision he makes."

"You'll find out I was never sand at all, but a seed, and out of death I'll make life. You can't break me. And whatever plan you have in mind, you can't make me."

"God's hand is strange to us. He cares nothing for the moment, nothing for the feeble ambitions of men and women. He sees the road that flows onward forever."

"Like all children they only wanted to be known, and cared little about giving that gift to others."

"He would rather lose his power for doing right, than keep his power by doing wrong. Because he loves his people more than he loves his office."

"You really are children. You have no idea how power works, or who has it, or what you can actually do with it."

"No man can bear to live with a woman who speaks nothing but the truth to him."

"Honesty always sounds like impudence to the vain and stupid."

"Such a darling child, they would say, and pat her head. And Miriam would answer in her heart: you made my father a slave. You want us all dead. You are the river, you and all of Egypt. You are the river and as long as we stay beside you we are in danger of drowning."

"Whenever I hear you saying, rise and shine, rise and shine, it makes me think how lucky dead people are!"

"What's so wrong with feeling sorry for myself? Better that than trying to get other people to feel sorry for me."

"Home is where the people who live there need me to come home to them, and worry about me when I'm gone. There's no such place on this earth, no matter how far I drive."

"I've known too many men who never quite felt married no matter how many wives they'd been through. Their own and otherwise."

"Please open your mind to the possibility that I might be an honest man who was himself deceived."

"Why give you answers you wont believe? Well, answers I don't believe would be a step forward."

"The ways of love are strange and hard: the love you want is always barred; the love you have you want to change. The ways of love are hard and strange."

"When you have enough money the law is a reed that will always bend your way."

"You are exactly what you seem, and so you always assume that other people are, too."

"[He] wasn't interested in meeting the kind of women who would come to one of those places looking for the kind of man who hoped to meet a woman there."

"She had that irony in her eyes. Knowledge without wisdom. Power without purpose. Like me."

"All children are manipulators."

"What is this thing between women, like men are a joke that women all told each other long ago but men never get it."

"Deep inside himself, in a place he didn't often go, where he kept the things he didn't like to think about but dared not forget, he knew that [she] was still alive somewhere, and somehow she was watching what he did, or at least looking in on him from time to time."

"Love is random; fear is inevitable."

"Happiness is not a life without pain, but rather a life in which the pain is traded for a worthy price."