Brother Odd (Odd Thomas, #3)

by Dean Koontz

Teach us… To give and not to count the cost; To fight and not to heed the wounds; To toil and not to seek for rest… —St. Ignatius Loyola

We yearn for tomorrow and the progress that it represents. But yesterday was once tomorrow, and where was the progress in it? Or we yearn for yesterday, for what was or what might have been. But as we are yearning, the present is becoming the past, so the past is nothing but our yearning for second chances.

our age, self-indulgence and self-destruction, rather than self-sacrifice, are the foundations for new heroic myths.

“Here, in the quiet hours after midnight. Like sitting on a beach. The night rolls and breaks and tosses up our losses like bits of wreckage, all that’s left of one ship or another.”

“We ceaselessly examine the bits of wreckage in the surf, as though we can put the past together again, but that’s just torturing ourselves.”

How passionately we love everything that cannot last: the dazzling crystallory of winter, the spring in bloom, the fragile flight of butterflies, crimson sunsets, a kiss, and life.