As much as I've produced it looks to people like I must have written quickly, but it isn't that - because I put in in a sixty- or seventy-hour week.

The world is full of broken people. Splints, casts, miracle drugs, and time can't mend fractured hearts, wounded hearts, wounded minds, torn spirits.

What most people find important, you do not. This is Wisdom. To what you believe is important, you are ready to give your mind, heart, and soul. This is Grace.

Always, the eye sees more than the mind can comprehend, and we go through life self-blinded to much that lies before us. We want a simple world, but we live in a magnificently complex one, and rather than open ourselves to it, we perceive the world through filters that make it less daunting.

That is, Jack thought, the way of life. The horror changes us, because we can never forget. Cursed with memory. It starts when we're old enough to know what death is and realize that sooner or later we'll lose everyone we love. We're never the same. But somehow we're all right. We go on.

From time to time, I do consider that I might be mad. Like any self-respecting lunatic, however, I am always quick to dismiss any doubts about my sanity.

I believe that we carry within us a divinely inspired moral imperative to love ... We have within us the ability to change for the better and to find dignity as individuals rather than as drones in one mass movement or another. We have the ability to love, the need to be loved, and the willingness to put our own lives on the line to protect those we love, and it is in these aspects of ourselves that we can glimpse the face of God; and through the exercise of these qualities, we come to a Godlike state.