This world is full of broken things: broken hearts, broken promises, broken people.

She was plump, with dyed red hair and a face so caked with cosmetics that the floor of the Amazon jungle probably saw more natural light.

Here is a truth, a truth by which to live: there is hope. There is always hope. If we choose to abandon it, our souls will turn to ash and blow away.

I thought it was her wicked stepmother who poisoned her...' '...Turned out the wicked stepmother had an alibi.' '...Seems she was off poisoning someone else at the time. Chance in a million, really. It was just bad luck.

. . . For a lifetime was but a moment in that place, and each man dreams his own heaven. And in the darkness David closed his eyes, as all that was lost was found again.

I think the act of reading imbues the reader with a sensitivity toward the outside world that people who don't read can sometimes lack. I know it seems like a contradiction in terms; after all reading is such a solitary, internalizing act that it appears to represent a disengagement from day-to-day life. But reading, and particularly the reading of fiction, encourages us to view the world in new and challenging ways...It allows us to inhabit the consciousness of another which is a precursor to empathy, and empathy is, for me, one of the marks of a decent human being.

He had never really speculated about this before, since demons came in all shapes and sizes. Indeed, some of them came in more than one shape or size all by themselves, such as O'Dear, the Demon of People Who Look in Mirrors and Think They're Overweight, and his twin, O'Really, the Demon of People Who Look in Mirrors and Think They're Slim When They're Not.