William Lashner

Be careful what you yearn for, because that which you desire most will either complete you or destroy you, and you don't get to choose.

Life is unbearably perverse; that which we most seek to avoid always becomes unavoidable.

Unlike the rest of you, I cheerfully admit to my own utter selfishness. I am self-made, self-absorbed, self-serving, self-referential, even self-deprecating, in a charming sort of way. In short, I am all the selfs except selfless. Yet every so often I run across a force of nature that shakes my sublime self-centeredness to its very roots. Something that tears through the landscape like a tornado, leaving nothing but ruin and reexamination in its wake.

There I sat, in the wreckage of my apartment, in the wreckage of my life – no love, no prospects, a gnawing sense of existential futility along with the certainty that a better life was being lived by everyone else.

We were, all of us, prisoners of our character, unable to alter our true inner natures. When we said we had changed, what had only really changed was our luck. Put us in the same circumstances as our previous folly and suddenly we’d revert, all of us, to what we were. That’s what I believed.

Michael Robotham

Resentment is like swallowing a poison and waiting for the other person to die.

Remember, the worst hour of your life only lasts for sixty minutes.

One of the strange things about friendship is that time together isn't cancelled out by time apart. One doesn't erase the other or balance it on some invisible scale. You can spend a few hours with someone and they will change your life, or you can spend a lifetime with a person and remain unchanged.

Alcoholics don’t have relationships-they take hostages.

Truth is a matter of semantics, whether we like it or not.

Sometimes friends do foolish things. My father told me that true friends are like gold coins. Ships are wrecked by storms and lie for hundreds of years on the ocean floor. Worms destroy the wood. Iron corrodes. Silver turns black but gold doesn't change in sea water. It loses none of its brilliance or colour. It comes up the same. It survives shipwrecks and time.

Walter Mosley

We are not trapped or locked up in these bones. No, no. We are free to change. And love changes us. And if we can love one another, we can break open the sky.

A peasant that reads is a prince in waiting.

The job of the writer is to take a close and uncomfortable look at the world they inhabit, the world we all inhabit, and the job of the novel is to make the corpse stink.

If you want to be a writer, you have to write every day... You don't go to a well once but daily. You don't skip a child's breakfast or forget to wake up in the morning...

That's how powerful you are, girl...You pretty, but pretty alone is not what people see. You the kinda pretty, the kinda beauty, that's like a mirror. Men and women see themselves in you, only now they so beautiful that they can't bear to see you go.

A man's bookcase will tell you everything you'll ever need to know about him.

It hurts when they're gone. And it doesn't matter if it's slow or fast, whether it's a long drawn-out disease or an unexpected accident. When they're gone the world turns upside down and you're left holding on, trying not to fall off.

Susan Elia MacNeal

Jolly good!" ... King [George VI] exclaimed [after Queen Elizabeth fired the gun at Hitler's photograph]. "You got him right in the n-n-n-naughty bits."... "Good," she said. "That's where I was aiming.

His one indulgence was attending the occasional Chelsea Blues game.

Pull yourself together. You can have a nice big breakdown after you get back to London.…

I’m through allowing myself to be confined to so-called ‘women’s work.’ I’m also through with patronizing men giving me half-truths and withholding information. That will end here and now.

Without the freedom to criticize, there is no true praise.

Please,” David said, “we’re British—we adore animals. It’s children we can’t stand. That’s why we invented boarding schools. More tea?

The Black Dog of depression was dirty and scarred, feral and rabid. He lurked in the night, yellow eyes gleaming, waiting for a chink in the armor, a weakness, a vulnerability, a memory. And then, jaws wide and fangs sharp, he would leap.

Chris Pavone

It was impossible to understand how brief it is. It seemed like youth would last so long; it would last forever. But it's just a blink.

The best hiding spots are not the most hidden; they're merely the least searched.

And everyone's in the same situation, basically: we're all finding our separate ways, together.

People who were too outgoing made her suspicious. She couldn't help but presume that all the loud noise was created to hide quiet lies.

This is the expat life: you never know when someone you see every day is going to disappear forever, instantly transmogrifying into a phantom. Before long you won’t be able to remember her last name, the color of her eyes, the grades that her children were in. You can’t imagine not seeing her tomorrow. You can’t imagine you yourself being one of those people, someone who one day just vanishes. But you are.

Travel wasn't fun if you didn't get to see or do what you wanted; it was merely a different type of work, in a different place.

Carolyn G. Hart

At this moment, somewhere in the world, children died of starvation, bombs exploded to maim and kill the innocent, hurricanes destroyed everything in their path, but the loveliness of this moment was as real as wars and plagues and heartbreak. Pleasure and beauty are as valid as pain and ugliness and when I am fortunate enough to enjoy the former, I do so.

Heaven doesn't need dusting. The only tidying that remains is to continue growing in goodness, and goodness knows, for most of us there is always room for improvement.

Each moment had a brief life and was gone, never to return. Prized moments were never about riches, not jewels nor silks, not fine cars nor mansions, not stacks of cash nor stock certificates. Prized moments were a look of love, a gentle touch, the sight of a cat's grace, sunlight slanting through a stained glass window.

A verse from Ecclesiastes was a favorite of Laurel's: "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun." Some might find the message chilling. Laurel in her own mystical way felt part of a continuum of time.

Robert Crais

There isn't so much love in the world that you can turn it away when it's offered.

She asked me why I always had something flip to say. I said that I didn't know, but having been blessed with the gift, I felt obliged to use it.

Adults always wonder what to say and how to say it when they're talking to a child. You want to be wise, but all you are is a child yourself in a larger body. Nothing is ever what it seems. The things that you think you know are never certain. I know that now. I wish that I didn't, but I do.

People want you to be ordinary.

It's easy to sound good. All you do is leave in the parts where you act tough and forget the parts where you get shoved around.

When you see someone, all you see is what they let you see.

fficiency and focus are the keys to success.

Criminals did not have friends. They had associates, suppliers, fences, whores, sugar daddies, enablers, dealers, collaborators, co-conspirators, victims and bosses, any of whom they might rat out and none of whom could be trusted.

Matt Haig

How to stop time: kiss.
How to travel in time: read.
How to escape time: music.
How to feel time: write.
How to release time: breathe.

Wherever you are, at any moment, try and find something beautiful. A face, a line out of a poem, the clouds out of a window, some graffiti, a wind farm. Beauty cleans the mind.

And most of all, books. They were, in and of themselves, reasons to stay alive. Every book written is the product of a human mind in a particular state. Add all the books together and you get the end sum of humanity. Every time I read a great book I felt I was reading a kind of map, a treasure map, and the treasure I was being directed to was in actual fact myself.

Make sure, as often as possible, you are doing something you’d be happy to die doing.

No one will understand you. It is not, ultimately, that important. What is important is that you understand you.

Maybe love is just about finding the person you can be your weird self with.

William Kent Krueger

The dead are never far from us. They're in our hearts and on our minds and in the end all that separates us from them is a single breath, one final puff of air.

The miracle is this: that you will rise in the morning and be able to see again the startling beauty of the day.

I used to ask for an easy life, now I ask to be strong.

He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain, which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful graces of God.

God never promised us an easy life. He never promised that we wouldn’t suffer, that we wouldn’t feel despair and loneliness and confusion and desperation. What he did promise was that in our suffering we would never be alone. And though we may sometimes make ourselves blind and deaf to his presence he is beside us and around us and within us always. We are never separated from his love. And he promised us something else, the most important promise of all. That there would be surcease. That there would be an end to our pain and our suffering and our loneliness, that we would be with him and know him, and this would be heaven.

Lindsay Faye

I hope that the epitaph of the human race when the world ends will be: Here

 perished a species which lived to tell stories.

We tell stories to strangers to ingratiate ourselves, stories to lovers to better adhere us skin to skin, stories in our heads to banish the demons. When we tell truth, often we are callous; when we tell lies, often we are kind. Through it all, we tell stories, and we own an uncanny knack for the task.

Hope, I've discovered, is a sad nuisance. Hope is a horse with a broken leg

And in a way I have always thought that words are alive a little, for they can whisper sweet nothings and roar dragon flame with equal efficiency.

Though I no longer presumed to have a conscience, I have never once lacked feelings.

Being brave and being alone aren't the same thing. Some tragedies bind us, as lies do; they are ropes braided of hurt and bitterness, and you cannot ever fully understand how pinioned you are until the ties are loosened.