Quotes from Charles Martin

so, the water that would cleanse me was not water from my head—where I'd learned to rationalize my indifference. But water from my heart.

You unhinged your body from an opium addiction with a book?" She smiled. "Not just any book. A series of thirteen books by one author. I've read them twenty or thirty times each." "You've read one book twenty or thirty times?" "Actually, I've read thirteen books twenty-seven times.

Letting myself experience or desire pleasure is like a shot through the heart of their memory.

People would much rather die holding someone's hand than live alone.

My life has been real different than I thought. Ain't turned out how I hoped . . . nor dreamt. But I'm not the only man in the world to get screwed by life. Lots are worse off than me. That's life. 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.

What do you dream? To live with and alongside... rather than without and alone.

the director's

because casinos are really good at taking people's money and making them feel worse than they did when they walked in, they offer live entertainment to medicate the malaise. Or lessen the blow.

Saint Augustine said it best: You stir man to take pleasure in praising You, because You have made us for Yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in You.

In my experience, it's those words on the tip of the tongue that we most need to hear. They are the key. The thing that's missing. But you can't pull them out. They have to be offered. Freely. And they won't be offered until the owner trusts you with them. And to do that means they've got to break through a world of hurt and pain just to get them out of their mouth.

some people take all the pain they've been knowing their whole life and pack it down inside them where it festers, oozing pus. Gangrene of the soul. That sore then becomes them. It's what bubbles up. You can smell it.

Sir, I've had the experience of being in a country where people were trying to kill me. Every day. That simplifies life a good bit. In matters of the heart, we have only two options. Hate them or love them. That's it. That's all we got. There's no middle.

understand this until you have a boy of your own, but listen close. The sins of the father are carried down to the son. There's nothing you can do to stop what's passed to you. You are going to wrestle with it until the day you die, whether you like it or not. The only choice is whether or not you pass them to your son. Stopping it is a choice you make.' She closed

As early as 3000 BC, the Chinese had named the heart the Emperor of Organs. Since then, people have spent their whole lives looking for the Holy Grail, the fountain of youth, or the center of the universe. Why look so far away when it's right there in the middle of every human on the planet? The more I understood this, the closer I thought I was getting

But time does heal. Not like we think it does, not like we would—from the front—but more from the back or side or someplace we can't see it coming. It bubbles up beneath and rises all around.

The point is not the fishing . . . the point is the kid.

Maybe that's the sign of true friendship, when silence is not uncomfortable.

Life at seventeen seemed so clear.

And, after all, what is a lie? 'Tis but the truth in masquerade.

Dummy #3, the man with the cut Achilles

Hope has a funny way of cracking people down the middle. Cutting through the tough places.

The record companies kept calling, and pretty soon I was letting the same anti-dad voices live rent-free in my mind. Fueling my discontent

In my experience, it's those words on the tip of the tongue that we most need to hear. They are the key. The thing that's missing. But you can't pull them out. They have to be offered. Freely. And they won't be offered until the owner trusts you with them. And to do that means they've got to break through a world of hurt and pain just to get them out of their mouth. I caught my reflection in the mirror.

I know I'm not alone and I don't walk alone. That I won't. When the thin whisper of a veil between what I can't see and what I can is pulled back and for one brief second I get a glimpse of what will be. Where the words 'might' and 'hope' intersect.