Quotes from Richard Paul Evans

For poetry, like life, is its own justification

Do we have dreams, or do dreams have us?

You can tell a lot about a man by watching how he treats those he doesn't have to be nice to.

The greatest shackles we bear in this life are those forged by our own fears.

Nearly a million people take their lives each year. It's not about survival; it's about finding meaning in living. Even in our suffering

A man cannot live his life by the calculations of retribution. I did what I had to do and hope the consequences are kind.

Sometimes we need the darkness to reveal our light.

I spent most of my life trying to earn my mother's love before I learned that love can't be earned. Earned love isn't love; it's an emotional wage, a paycheck for time served.

My parents haven't reached out to me once. They're religious but not godly.

he was telling the story to the Pharisees: self-righteous, proud, and judgmental people who looked down on others. People like me. He was trying to teach them to look past their pride and into their hearts—to embrace the lost not with judgment or condemnation but with celebration.

What a peculiar alchemist is time—transforming painful experiences into comedy.

between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.' " She looked up.

They say love is blind, but it's not. Infatuation is blind. Emotional neediness is blind. Love sees the fault—it just sees beyond it as well. Kimberly Rossi's Diary

When our government officials lodged complaints over their treatment of their own people, they were told it wasn't any of their business. They'd take our blood and weapons, but not our counsel. We were so afraid of the world turning communist… The choice was between one devil or the other.

Real love is not to desire a person but to desire their happiness – sometimes even at the expense of our own happiness. Real love is to expand our own capacity for tolerance and caring, to actively seek another's well-being. All else is simply a charade of self-interest.

it's best we not keep all our eggs in one basket.

I was raised Catholic. I went to church every Sunday with my family, then came home and got beaten up by my old man. He beat God right out of me.

We all swim deep in the river of our ancestry.

I found myself changing into the very thing I hated. That's what hate does—it remakes us in its image.

Writing always came naturally to me. It was like speaking, but easier. Actually, a lot easier.

Hating those boys didn't do anything to the boys, just to me. So I pushed them and all my hate from my heart. Once I did that, God came back in.

Prologue When I began writing this story, I thought I had some idea of what it was about. I was wrong. In my life writing I've discovered that there are times when a story, like architecture, is carefully designed, erected, and furnished. Then there are tales that take their own way, and I find myself being dragged along after them like a white-knuckled water skier behind a speedboat.

We fear jumping because we fear falling. We fear being broken. But still, jump we must, because it's only in jumping that we'll ever find someone to catch us.

I believe that, for the most part, we don't succeed in spite of our hardships but precisely because of them.