Richard Paul Evans

“What a difference having a friend makes.”

“Iwas not a reader at all, not until I discovered 'The Hobbit.' That changed my life. It gave me the courage to read. It led me to the 'Lord of the Rings' series. And once I'd read that, I knew I could read anything because I had just read thousands of pages.”

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

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

“I find myself seeking out the commonalities of our different religious experiences with hopes of encouraging, through my writings, the most hopeful, loving and redemptive qualities in all of us.”

“I don't want to go to Peru."How do you know? You've never been there."I've never been to hell either and I'm pretty sure I don't want to go there.”

“Dance. Dance for the joy and breath of childhood. Dance for all children, including that child who is still somewhere entombed beneath the responsibility and skepticism of adulthood. Embrace the moment before it escapes from our grasp. For the only promise of childhood, of any childhood, is that it will someday end. And in the end, we must ask ourselves what we have given our children to take its place. And is it enough?”

“We can only lose what we have first claimed.”

“I think the secret to a hoppy life is a selective memory. Remember what you are most grateful for and quickly forget what your not.”

“I hope you can someday forgive me.''I forgive you now.”

“Suffering ceases to be suffering when we form a clear picture of it.”

“To forgive is to unlock the cage of another's folly to set ourselves free.”

“My grandfather, a devout Christian, had the gift of healing.”

“Without dreams, life is a desert.”

“I am not a believer in love at first sight. For love, in its truest form, is not the thingof starry-eyed or star-crossed lovers, it is far more organic, requiring nurturing and timeto fully bloom, and, as such, seen best not in its callow youth but in its wrinkled maturity.Like all living things, love, too, struggles against hardship, and in the process shedsits fatuous skin to expose one composed of more than just a storm of emotion–one of loyaltyand divine friendship. Agape. And though it may be temporarily blinded by adversity,it never gives in or up, holding tight to lofty ideals that transcend this earth andtime–while its counterfeit simply concludes it was mistaken and quickly runs off tofind the next real thing.”

“It's been said that parents should give their children roots and wings. That was a perfect description of my parents. Even in a wheelchair, my father was a dreamer with his head in the clouds and my mother was the roots with both feet planted firmly on terra quaking firma.”

“My mom used to say that faith and fear can't exist simultaneously in the mind any more than light and dark can exist simultaneously in the same room.”

“The smells of Christmas are the smells of childhood”

“Chocolate is God's apology for brocolli”