Quotes from Richard Paul Evans

It seems a long time since I remembered all I have to be grateful for. Perhaps that's why it's been such a long time since I've been really happy.

But more than brave, you have love. And love is brave.

Bad memories can attach themselves like barnacles to the hulls of our lives. And, like barnacles, they have a disproportionately large amount of drag.

We all got things under our skin. Everybody does. Like a glass sliver. Can't see nothin' there, but it works its way in deeper and gets to festerin' and hurts so that we're ready to just cut the whole thing out.

Under the right circumstances, a tiny spark can grow into an inferno that can overcome an entire city. So can an idea.

Soon I will sleep. What shall I dream of, my love? I will dream of you, of course. And I will dream for a place for us to be, a sanctuary where hearts will never break again. This is my dream, my heart. Never forget that there is no end to us, as there can be no end to love. Love must last forever, or why else would there be love? Until then, I will dream.

I am facing the most difficult thing of my life, my own greatest failure.

We plan our lives in long, unbroken stretches that intersect our dreams the way highways connect the city dots on a road map. But in the end we learn that life is lived in the side roads, alleys, and detours. Alan Christoffersen's diary

It is that to which we cling that drags us to the bottom of the abyss. There is real power at having nothing to lose.

It takes great courage to wear kindness as if one had never been hurt.

It's good to take counsel from the past but not to be ruled by it. Otherwise we end up using today to fight yesterday's battles and miss tomorrow's promis.

Some so fear the future that they suffocate the present. It's like committing suicide to avoid being murdered.

You're lucky your mother died,' she said. I didn't like that. 'I'm lucky my mother died?' Between sobs she said, 'Your mother would have stayed if she could. My mother chose to leave me. She's still out there somewhere. I wish she had died instead.' I sat down next to her and put my arm around her. 'I'll never leave you.' She laid her head on my shoulder. 'I know.

Humans need to belong. Humans have always needed tribes. Today we find tribes in family or clubs or religion. What happens when we fall out of them? I suppose, in prehistoric times, it was fatal to be cast out of a tribe, to be exiled or excommunicated from the group, away from the people we love and need. Exile from the tribe is a form of execution.

There is not only more to each soul's journey than we imagine, usually there is more than we can imagine.

We all have two stories---the journal of our life evnets, and the fiction we tell ourselves about them. Charles James's Diary

Good. I didn't hear the four a.m. rooster alarm." "I did," Taylor said. "It went on for like ten minutes before I rebooted it." "You rebooted a rooster?" "I think so. It stopped mid-crow.

I once heard it said that everyone needs love-and if they're denied, they'll find it, or a reasonable substitute somewhere.

All that's required for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.

For the first time I realized that gratitude and joy were connected, like conjoined twins. I couldn't be happy because I wasn't grateful and I wasn't grateful because I wasn't allowing myself to be. I was too busy hunting the next prize to appreciate the prize already at home. What I had was never enough, not because of the deficit in what I had but because of the deficit in me.

I once heard a writer say, 'It's easy to write a novel, you just slit your wrist and let it bleed on the pages.' She was right...Sophocles and Freud believed that we are defined by our fears. There's a lot of truth to that. When you share your greatest fears, your vulnerability, we bond in that honesty. We connect with each other and we don't feel so alone. And that's what books are really about. Connecting.

If you love only those who give you happy news, you will never love those worthy of your trust. For those who love you will speak truth, and truth is not always happy, but it is always a blessing.

Why is it that good always has to fight an uphill battle?" I thought for a moment, then said, "I don't know. Maybe that's the point. Good things are higher up.

The natives used to tie their enemies to the tree. The ants would eat them alive.