It's better to lose someone you love than to have no one to lose.

Twisted and perverse are the ways of the human mind. Pinocchio was such a dolt to try to become a real boy. He was much better off with a wooden head.

No human being, when you understand his desires, is worthless. No one's life is nothing. Even the most evil of men and women, if you understand their hearts, had some generous act that redeems them, at least a little, from their sins.

It had become one of the defining truths of my life that, no matter how I tried to keep them flattened, two-dimensional, jailed in paper and ink, there would always be stories that refused to stay bound inside books. It was never just a story.

He sauntered around Olympus in his gleaming robes with his bow and arrow, winking at the ladies and high-fiving the dudes, or sometimes winking at the dudes and high-fiving the ladies. Apollo didn't care. He figured everybody loved him.

The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding.

If love is our reason we may veer off course sometimes, but we’ll never be lost.

Sometimes we can’t know what’s right. We can only know that we meant to do the right thing—and that we had the right reason.

No, you can't understand. You're using the language of reason, not of the heart; you live in a world of abstractions.

They read fantasy books, this is fun for them, people leaving the earth, possessing cosmic time, different worlds. They can't be afraid of death in the way that adults are afraid of death, but death interests them as something fantastical.

The mechanism of evil will work under conditions of the apocalypse, also. That's what I understood. Man will gossip, and kiss up to the bosses, and save his television and ugly fur coat. And people will be the same until the end of time. Always.

Believe me, if you don't believe yourself. Getting over something like this takes time. It won't be better today. Not tomorrow, either. Maybe in a year, though, it won't be like this. Maybe in a year you'll have mostly forgotten. But it will still be there.

Even gods can’t last forever. I don’t expend my energy trying to fight the change of seasons. I focus on making sure the days I have, and the season I oversee, are as joyful, rich, and plentiful as possible.

People have destructive impulses. Some of us want to see the world in ruins just for the fun of it . . . even if we're ruined along with it.

Myths are simply stories about truths we've forgotten.

We are who we are. When changes come, we start with what we are right then, and then we work to try to become whoever we need to be.

The cycle of life exists in order to perpetuate the cycle of life.