Brother Odd Quotes
"Living in a monastery, even as a guest rather than as a monk, you have more opportunities than you might have elsewhere to see the world as it is, instead of through the shadow that you cast upon it."
"In spite of her limitations and her suffering, she was a happy child. These preparations for flight were out of character."
"We all have our problems, and yours seem as important to you as mine seem to me."
"An entourage of the recently dead is disconcerting and generally not conducive to an upbeat mood."
"Perhaps you have a ninety-minute commute every morning, on freeways clogged with traffic, your progress hampered by impatient and incompetent motorists, some of them angry specimens with middle fingers muscular from frequent use."
"Imagine, however, how much more stressful your morning might be if in the passenger seat was a young man with a ghastly ax wound in his head and if in the backseat an elderly woman, strangled by her husband, sat pop-eyed and purple-faced."
"The only thing I know for sure is how much I do not know. Maybe there is wisdom in that recognition. Unfortunately, I have found no comfort in it."
"The true source of the chill might have been an understanding that our only choice is pyre or pyre, that we live and breathe to be consumed by fire or fire."
"The essence of all this reformation is that these sisters are more orthodox than those modern nuns who seem to consider themselves social workers who don’t date."
"His eyes were violet and hooded, and his gaze was as steady as the aim of a battle-hardened sharpshooter."
"The monks of St. Bartholomew’s are encouraged to cultivate silence at all times, except during scheduled social periods."
"I did not want to encourage Brother John to speak with me."
"An imposing figure in any circumstances, Brother John made me think now of Captain Nemo on the bridge of the Nautilus."
"Brother John is as sane as I am. Make of that what you wish."
"Delicious," I said, after swallowing a bite of the cookie."
"I understood subatomic structure when I was six."
"At six, I made a pretty cool fort out of Lego blocks."
"My intellect is God-given. I’ve a sacred obligation to use it."
"Everything," he said, and the door slid shut between us.
"The beauty took my breath, the way the snow fell and yet the night was still, the intricacy of the simplicity."
"Some nights, it seems my brain is someone else’s TV, and they won’t stop channel surfing."
"Humanity is a parade of fools, and I am at the front of it, twirling a baton."
"Maybe chewing aspirin and letting them dissolve in your mouth speeds up absorption of the medication, but they taste like crap."
"He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words."
"The beauty of the world lies in the diversity of its people."
"Beyond her, the blizzard didn’t seem as though it wanted to be embraced, not this storm of storms."
"Neither a demon nor an Amway salesperson loomed out of the frigid tempest before I pushed the door shut."
"You’ll do no such thing. You’re a guest here. Letting you do my work, I’d be embarrassed in front of the Lord."
"If I’ve got my chores done before None and rosary, then I might take time for the weather."
"Nothing wrong with a good draft! Some are cold, some are warm, but it’s all just air on the move, circulating so it’s healthy to breathe."
"At a touch, a hug, a kiss on the cheek, at any indication that you value them, respect them, believe in them, they shine."
"Their small triumphs thrill them as much as winning a marathon might thrill you."
"I have no pity for you. You wreck a kid’s life."
"Hell must be going through a construction boom these days."
"The past cannot be redeemed. What has been and what might have been both bring us to what is."
"There is no grief before or after time, which is all the consolation we should need."
"There may not be any left later. Everyone loves my orange-and-almond cake."
"They smell so good that I’m afraid they’re decadent."
"Brother Constantine, the dead monk, the infamous suicide who lingers stubbornly in this world."
"If nuns had designed and operated the nuclear plant at Chernobyl, we would not have suffered a radiation disaster."
"The wind seemed to be full of words, all angry and growing rapidly angrier, in a brutal language ideal for imprecation, malediction, blasphemy, and threat."
"Imagine that all the universe and all of time are together kept in right motion and in perfect balance by an infinite gearbox, and in your mind look down into that intricate mechanism, and you will have a sense of my incomprehension, awe, and terror as I stood before the uberskeleton that churned and ticked and flexed and clicked, peeling the gossamer remnants of Brother Tim away from itself."
"I pulled the door shut between the cooling tower and the service passage and fumbled with my key for a moment before I realized that the lock only kept people out; I couldn’t lock anyone inside."
"The four hundred feet to the school appeared to be immeasurable miles, the ceiling lights receding to Pittsburgh and beyond."
"The time had come either to light the black candles and start chanting in admiration—or blow this dump."
"The skin split from the corners of his mouth to his ears. With not one bead of blood, his upper lip peeled toward his scalp, the way the lid of a sardine can rolls back with the twist of a key, and the lower part of his face peeled down over his chin."
"I felt well advised to take a step back from him."
"Perhaps triggered by that action, a smaller cube turned end over end and rendered itself into four diminished replicas."
"You would want to be twenty miles from here," Romanovich told the novice. "A bit late for that."
"There’s that eye-twitch tell," said Brother Quentin, pointing at me, frowning as he must have frowned at numerous suspects in the homicide-division interrogation room.
"Cube an apple, and the pieces will weigh as much as the whole fruit. But mass was disappearing here."
"Odd—he ain’t like them, ain’t like I once was. Fact is, he ain’t like nobody I ever known before."
"We were destined to be together forever, my girl and I."
"It’s a world of sorrow, Oddie, because we make it so."
"She sang soft and made the dark small again."
"Every one of them might be slated for destruction."
"Keeping busy is giving to the world whatever you are capable of contributing."
"What he wants and what he gets are not the same thing."
"He’s the Neverwas, but he’s also the Neverwill."
"The number of serious crimes was greater than the number of reporters available to cover them."
"Journalism had come to seem not like a career but like an incarceration."
"The light of the world descends from the Everlasting Light that is God."
"Matter can arise from energy, that thought is a form of energy and that thought itself can be concretized into the very object that is imagined."
"Taking pride in it would be like taking pride in how well my kidneys function."
"Computers are creations of human beings, so they have bias built in."
"This is not proof of God. This is blasphemy."
"Absolution grants you forgiveness for it, but does not expunge the past."