Quotes from Charles Martin

There is no way on this earth that something so beautiful can come out of something so screwed up. So black-hearted. But somehow it does, and because it's beautiful and I don't want to lose it, and because there is still a part of me that would like to share it, I write it down.

Never argue with a woman about her house. Remember that. It's hers, not yours." He waved his paint-brush toward the kitchen and whispered, "I may have built it, but in truth, we're just lucky she lets us sleep here.

weight when it comes to walking into one's future, and if anything can rob you of now, it's yesterday. We are really good at taking the pain of our past and projecting it into our future because it's what we know, and yet our past has almost nothing to do with our future other than being connected by seconds. That's it. So we face a choice. Either shine a light on yesterday and expose it, or forfeit the joy of now and the hope of tomorrow.

down one giant spiral

This is a battlefield. Has been since Cain killed Abel. And don't let it get complicated. Gray it ain't. It's black and white. Good versus evil. You might as well choose sides right now." He nodded back over his shoulder. "Thanks to you…" He lifted my hand and stared at the center knuckle. The cut had spread open. "… those boys in there are reconsidering their choice.

The amazing thing about transplantation, aside from the fact that it worked, was that it allowed people to feel again. The thing I liked best about my previous life was the first smile when a patient woke up. Because with that smile, I knew that I hadn't simply given that persona new pump, I had given him or her a new pump that allowed that person to live, to express emotion. It was the smile, even more than the first beat of the heart, that told me it had worked.

You take the bad with the good. Rise up through it. Live in the midst of it. It's the bad that lets you know how good the good really is. Don't let the bad leave you thinking like there ain't no good. There is, and lots of it, too.

Final words are hard to hear when you know for certain they are indeed final. And I knew for certain.

He tapped me gently in the chest. "And neither are you. So, if your mind is telling you that God slipped up and might have made one giant mistake when it comes to you, you remember the firefly's butt.

If someone is bent on hurting herself, she'll find a way to do it. She was a grown woman; sooner or later, she was responsible for herself.

trust is built over time and

One of the mysteries of music is that two can achieve together what one never could do alone. The effect is exponential. It's also the only activity on Planet Earth that can transport those who hear it from place A to place B in about two beats. It can shift a mood from laughter to tears to I-can-conquer-the-world to what-if and hope. It's the original time travel machine.

Many times in our lives, we act like He's still dead. But several times today, we've testified that He's not. So which is it? Why say one thing with your mouth and yet live another with your life? If He's alive, act like it. He either is or He isn't. You can't be half-alive.

Kids are like a spring, or a Stretch Armstrong. No matter how many times they're passed around, passed off, and passed on . . . they snap back." He spit through his window. "Hope . . . it's the fuel that feeds them." He shook his head and spit something off the end of his tongue. "God forbid the day they stop eating it.

That was the night I learned the value of an old hymn. How something so old and "out-of-date" could say words my heart needed to hear and didn't know how to say.

To die is nothing; but it is terrible not to live. —Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

encountered spent their days working feverishly to make enough money to buy a better tomorrow. Here, people are content—they buy what they need today and leave tomorrow to God.

When he was finished, he left without so much as a word.

Music reaches people at a level that is beneath their DNA. Dad was right. Again. Music exposes what and who we worship.

five ways of "knowing": personal experience, revelation, empirical evidence, logic, and hearsay. Given those methods of knowing something, I know this—and I'd stake my life on it: William "Liam" McFarland willingly took the fall for something he didn't do. I have lived my entire life in a chasm, pulled between two polar tensions.

Sometimes, given their depth, we become little more than the sum of our wounds, and it takes someone else to see what we can be instead of what we are.

sold into trafficking by foster parents before puberty. While she still believed the tooth fairy was real.

Music is its own dimension and it reaches people at a level that is beneath their DNA. Nothing else brings about a corporate reaction like music. It exposes what and who we worship.

every man has a basement. Some lay dark. Unlit. Concealed. Others sprawl like airport runways for all the world to see. The difference is determined by whether he is hiding something or digging it up. Hammer or shovel says much about a man. [Murphy Shepherd']