“It may be unfair, but what happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime.”

True redemption is when guilt leads to good.

The desert weed lives on, but the flower of spring blooms and wilts.

But then it passed, as all things do.

When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife’s right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness.

In many parts of the world, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. But I think we need women to solve the problems that men create.

There was so much goodness in my life. So much happiness. I wondered whether I deserved any of it.

I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.

It’s wrong what they say about the past, I’ve learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out.

You see, some things I can teach you. Some you learn from books. But there are things that, well, you have to see and feel.

And that’s the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.

A man who has no conscience, no goodness, does not suffer.

But better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.

The problem, of course, was that [he] saw the world in black and white. And he got to decide what was black and what was white. You can’t love a person who lives that way without fearing him too. Maybe even hating him a little.

Children aren’t coloring books. You don’t get to fill them with your favorite colors.

It’s a funny thing… but people mostly have it backward. They think they live by what they want. But really, what guides them is what they’re afraid of. What they don’t want.

You’re gutless. It’s how you were made. And that’s not such a bad thing because your saving grace is that you’ve never lied to yourself about it. Not about that. Nothing wrong with cowardice as long as it comes with prudence. But when a coward stops remembering who he is God help him.