Hope, however, isn't all that's needed to achieve change. Hope is a hand extended, but two hands are required to be pulled out of this deep hole. The second hand was faith.

Given enough time, you could convince yourself that loneliness was something better, that it was solitude, the ideal condition for reflection, even a kind of freedom. Once you were thus convinced, you were foolish to open the door and let anyone in, not all the way in. You risked the hard-won equilibrium, that tranquility that you called peace

The best part of a Mr. Goodbar is not the wrapper, is it? No, and the best part of a Coke is not the can. On those nights when you lie awake, either man or boy, wondering about yourself, peeling away one layer of oddness after another, you should remember and always be grateful that the woefully imperfect person that you are, with all your contradictions and unworthy desires, is not the best of you, any more than the wrapper is the best part of a Mr. Goodbar. -Odd Thomas - Odd Apocalypse by Dean Koonts pgs. 354-355 chapter 53

She might have been born this way, without an empathy gene and other essentials. In that case, she would interpret any kindness as weakness. Among predatory beasts, any display of weakness is an invitation to attack.

Humanity is a parade of fools, and I am at the front of it, twirling a baton.

What will happen will happen. There is time for miracles until there is no more time, but time has no end.

We are coming out of a century that was taught that one way of looking at the world, that one form of behavior, is as valid as another. The idea of true evil has been blown away.