He also knew that rivals are best unmanned by being ignored.

I think that writers are, at best, outsiders to the society they inhabit. They have a kind of detachment, or try to have.

You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.

Human beings are remarkable - at what we can learn to live with. If we couldn't get strong from what we lose, and what we miss, and what we want and can't have, then we couldn't ever get strong enough, could we? What else makes us strong?

Everyone has a right to be a little happy, asshole.

What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.

I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice. Not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God. I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.