Quotes from Thomas H. Cook

I like characters who are changed, often for the better, by the dark nature of their experiences. I also can become engaged by a character for whom I wish to see justice done, one way or the other. In general, I require a book to have some sort of moral center.

At a certain point memory becomes a beach strewn with landmines, all life's many losses buried in those sands.

The last best hope of life is that at some point during living it, all that you did wrong will suddenly teach you to do right.

I went to the Alabama public schools at a time when my English teachers, all but one of whom was a woman, taught nothing but the classics. They revered the great British and American writers.

Life to me is defined by uncertainty. Uncertainty is the state in which we live, and there is no way to outfox it.

He looked at me intently, from what seemed behind the veil of a grave experience. Then slowly and prophetically, he said the scariest thing I'd ever heard: "Because the answer to a heartfelt question, Jack, will always break your heart.

The last best hope of life is that at some point during living it, all that you did wrong will suddenly teach you to do right.

It is important to keep old things, he insisted, because it was through them alone that new things could be judged.

A traveler enters the world into which he travels, but a tourist brings his own world with him and never sees the one he's in.

It was at that moment that I'd first begun to experience one of life's deepest lessons: you are the most alive when you feel the most vulnerable, not when the arrow is still in the quiver but when it has been released by the string and is flying toward you.

A man with no one to revere, Julian said, is a man alone.' At that moment, he seemed to consider such loneliness the worst of fates, a sentence he would not have imposed upon the vilest man on earth. And yet, at times, I thought now, he had seemed to impose that very loneliness upon himself.

Some truths hit harder than others.

At a certain point memory becomes a beach strewn with landmines, all life's many losses buried in those sands.

Loretta's eyes flashed. "Is that what gets you through the night, Philip?" she asked. "Choosing to believe something, whether it's true or not?" "In one way or another, Loretta, isn't that what gets everyone through the night?" I asked.

Perspective gets lost in moral certainties. Which only means that no one was ever burned at the stake by a doubter.

It's not that we grow old, I thought, but that we grow old in decline and discomfort, and these hardships are made worse by the awareness that nothing will improve. No coming days will dawn brighter than the last that dawned, and this sorrow is further deepened by a fear of death…

The world has plenty of noise, Julian, but not many voices. And because there are so few, each one matters. . . That's my argument. The simple fact that we need people who remind us of the darkness.

She was a woman of extended silences, I noticed, and she said very little as we walked the streets of La Boca, looking at its brightly colored houses. It was as if she understood that quiet observation was the key to knowing a place, perhaps even the key to life.

It all comes down to people in the end. All the global policies and grand schemes. They all come down to what we do to people, whether we help or harm them.

All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee; All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see; All Discord, Harmony not understood All partial Evil, universal Good. —ALEXANDER POPE, An Essay on Man

a horribly protracted death that would stretch into the indefinite future, a death not in one month or two or even three but one that might go on and on, with the whole process of dying getting worse every single day for years and years and years.

Not to relive it as it actually was, however, but as I would have it be, knowing all that I have since come to know. It is a dream of reaching back into the past and erasing some circumstance or making some small adjustment that will alter the course of our lives forever, and as time moves forward and mistake piles upon mistake, it becomes the deepest longing that we know.

Reality has a way of summoning the shadows," I tell him. Fareem laughs his worldly laugh. "Is that the

There are mysteries in science, and mysteries in art, but the greatest mystery has always been another person's deepest motivation.