Richard Paul Evans quotes:

Raising or caring for children requires sacrifice and service, which, I believe, heals us from the destructive forces of self-centeredness.

The idea of being a novelist is really romantic, but it's kind of the same as being president of the United States - it's not gonna happen.

Mr. Dallstrom is a bald, scarecrow of a man with a poochy stomache. Think of a pregnant Abraham Lincoln.

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 absolutely love playing the game 'Risk.'

I am a believer in angels, though not the picture-book kind with wings and harps. Such angelic accoutrements seem as nonsensical to me as devils sporting horns and carrying pitchforks. To me, angel wings are merely symbolic of their role as divine messengers.

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.

People are looking for inspiration, and my books are sometimes the vehicles of what people are looking for.

The most important story we'll ever write in life is our own-not with ink, but with our daily choices.

Some people were born to work for others. Not in a mindless, servile-way--rather they simply work better in a set regimen of daily tasks and functions. Others were born of the entrepreneurial spirit and enjoy the demands of self-determination and the roll of the dice.

We can spend our days bemoaning our losses, or we can grow from them. Ultimately the choice is ours. We can be victims of circumstance or masters of our own fate, but make no mistake, we cannot be both. The Walk - Epilogue Page 288

It is a peculiar thing to believe that you know someone intimately only to find that you really do not. It is like finishing a book only to discover that you have missed several key chapters. THE LETTER Chapter 9 page 104

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

Love never gives in or up, holding tight to lofty ideals that transcend this earth and time, while its counterfeit simply concludes it was mistaken and quickly runs off to find the next real thing.

There's a problem with marrying up. You always worry that someday they'll see through you and leave. Or, worse yet, someone better will come along and take her. In my case, it wasn't someone. And it wasn't something better.

The depth of love is revealed in its departure.

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.

Regret is the most tiresome of companions.

As we walk our individual life journeys, we pick up resentments and hurts, which attach themselves to our souls like burrs clinging to a hiker's socks. These stowaways may seem insignificant at first, but, over time, if we do not occasionally stop and shake them free, the accumulation becomes a burden to our souls.

The thing is, the only real sign of life is growth. And growth requires pain. So to choose life is to accept pain.

Some so fear the future that they suffocate the present. It's like committing suicide to avoid being murdered.

Everyone has some inner power that awaits discovery.

I suppose I have an active imagination, and writing allows me to live it out.

We plan our lives in long, unbroken stretches that intersect our dreams the way highways connect the city dots on a road map. But in the end we learn that life is lived in the side roads, alleys, and detours.

What a culture we live in, we are swimming in an ocean of information, and drowning in ignorance.

There are moments, it would seem, that were created in cosmic theater where we are given strange and fantastic tests. In these times, we do not show who we are to God, for surely He must already know, but rather to ourselves.

Heroes rarely look the way we draw them in our minds: attractive, imposing figures with rippling muscles and strong chins. More times than not they are humble beings, small and flawed. It is only their spirits that are beautiful and strong.

Everybody needs love. Everybody. Those who don't believe that frighten me a little.

It has been a mistake living my life in the past. One cannot ride a horse backwards and still hold its reins.

I once read that love is like a rose: we fixate on the blossom, but it's the thorny stem that keeps it alive and aloft. I think marriage is like that. Like my father said, the things of greatest value are the things we fight for. And in the end, if we do it right, we value the stem far more than the blossom

Often times, the greatest peace comes of surrender.

As one who would rather light a candle than curse the darkness.

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 don't know what is behind the curtain; only that I need to find out.

Only those who never step, never stumble.

Sunsets, like childhood, are viewed with wonder not just because they are beautiful but because they are fleeting.

Sometimes its not the strength but gentleness that cracks the hardest shells.

It's easy to hate the game when your losing.

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.

Truth is patient. It can afford to be for eventually it will have its way.

The sweetness of reunion is the joy of heaven.

Feelings can be like wild animals-we underrate how fierce they are until we've opened their cage

I've come to know that what we want in life is the greatest indication of who we really are.

Life has taught me that to fly, you must first accept the possibility of falling.

The truest grace is not to forgive, but to have never found fault.

Forgiveness is the key to the heart's shackles.

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

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

You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn't at all. You can be discouraged by failure-or you can learn from it. So go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because, remember, that's where you will find success.

Psychologists tested the story of the Good Samaritan. What they learned gives us reason to pause. The greatest determinant of who stopped to help the stranger in need was not compassion, morality, or religious creed. It was those who had the time. Makes me wonder if I have time to do good.

The greatest shackles we bear in thislife are those forged by our own fears

Some people spend so much time hunting treasure that they fail to see it all around them. It's like sifting through gold to find the silt.

I have come to believe that we do not walk alone in this life. There are others, fellow sojourners, whose journeys are interwoven with ours in seemingly random patterns, yet, in the end, have been carefully placed to reveal a remarkable tapestry. I believe God is the weaver at that loom.

The concept of spiritual healing was something I was raised with.

So often the pain of our life is no more than a reminder to take our hand off the stove.

I have Tourettes syndrome.

I have learned a great truth of life. We do not succeed in spite of our challenges and difficulties, but rather, precisely because of them.

Commitment to a plan or thought carries with it a force that can influence the unconscious mind and bring about the desired effect. In other words, once we decide to have something, the mind unconsciously begins to create the reality necessary to bring to pass what we desire.

People can become so blinded by their own perceived victimhood that they make victims of everyone around them.

I have a penchant for fresh notebooks and mechanical pencils. It seems every time I go to the store, I buy a new notebook. I have dozens of them just sitting around.

So much of young adult literature has turned dark, almost pathological. It's almost as if there is a race to see who can be the most dysfunctional.

Everyone has problems. It's how you choose to deal with them. Some people choose to be whiners some choose to be winners. Some choose to be victims some choose to be victors.

At one time in my career, Barnes and Noble bookstores categorized my books as religious fiction.

Don't try to write what other people are writing - write what is true to you.

The kids who speak well, are articulate and intelligent, are all readers.

"Wait and see" is no easier now than it was as a child.

"You know, I've wondered if it's more painful to lose someone you love to death or to lose someone you love because she no longer loves you back." "I don't know," I said. "On the surface, it seems an easy question. It should be so much easier to lose someone who doesn't love you, because why would you want to be with someone who doesn't want you? But rejection's not an east road. A part of you always wonders what makes you so unlovable."

. . . Harboring an emotion as powerful as gratitude has power of its own.

...even the most horribl e of nightmares is laced with the promise of dawn.

...for we are all amateurs at life, but if we do not focus too much on our mistakes, a miraculous picture emerges. And we learn that it's not the beauty of the image that warrants our gratitude--it's the chance to paint.

...the measure of life is revealed in the quality of our relationships: with God, our families, our fellow men." - A Perfect Day by Richard Paul Evans

A man's worth isn't measured by a bank register or diploma... It's about integrity

As a boy I heard this story in church. A man was patching a pitched roof of a tall building when he began sliding off. As he neared the edge of the roof he prayed, "Save me, Lord, and I'll go to church every Sunday, I'll give up drinking, I'll be the best man this city has ever known." As he finished his prayer, a nail snagged onto his overalls and saved him. The man looked up to the sky and shouted, "Never mind, God. I took care of it myself." How true of us.

Books are the most tolerant of friends.

Broken vows are like broken mirrors. They leave those who held to them bleeding and staring at fractured images of themselves.

But more than brave, you have love. And love is brave.

Can you ever forgive me? I already have. How could you? I don't deserve it. That's what makes it love.

Chocolate is God's apology for brocolli

Could it be that to truly love a thing is not to desire it, but to desire happiness for it?

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?

Denial, perhaps, is a necessary human mechanism to cope with the heartaches of life.

Dwelling on him would make him a bigger part of my life than I want him to be.

Every life can be learned from, as either a flame of hope or a cautionary flare.

Everyone who got to where they are had to begin where they were.

Forgiveness does not require us to close our eyes but rather to truly open them.

From our first babblings to our last word, we make but one statement, and that is our life.

Humanity is always looking for the next great world, the next frontier. I wonder how different this world would be if we were content with where we were.

I absolutely love playing the game 'Risk.

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

I believe that in spite of the chains we bind ourselves with, there's a primordial section of the human psyche that is still nomadic and still yearns to roam free.

I believe that love is the choice we make to raise ourselves and others to the highest planes of existence.

I believe that we were meant to live as social creatures, to reach out and bless each other's lives.

I don't think it is as much a human foible as it is a human curse that we cannot understand the beauty of a thing until it is gone.

I have learned that real angels don't have gossamer white robes and Cherubic skin, they have calloused hands and smell of the days' sweat.

I love when I can reboot people when they are being mean to others...

I see people getting so caught up in celebrating diversity that they are neglecting their commonality. I don't see this as a good thing. The Chinese culture has survived for more than five thousand years in part because the Chinese have embraced the same language and culture. I hope I am wrong about this, and that the flame is still on beneath the great American melting pot. Americans need each other, and a house divided, no matter the color of its occupants, is still divided. And divided we all fall.

If God came to save the world, why are so many of His professed followers intent on damning it?

If the errors of my life have profited me one great truth it is this: believe. Believe in your destiny and the star from which it shines. Believe you have been sent from God as an arrow pulled from his own bow. It is the single universal trait which the great of this earth have all shared, while the shadows are fraught with ghosts who roam the winds with mournful wails of regret on their lips. Believe as if your life depended upon it, for indeed it does.

I'm a humble guy, okay?

In the beginning, I had considered these stops on my journey as interruptions - but I'm coming to understand that perhaps these detours are my journey.

In the end, we all lose it. Remember that. In the end, we own nothing.

In your hurry to keep Christmas, you have forgotten Christmas. The truest gift of Christmas is the gift of self.

It is better to be loved by one person who knows your soul than millions who don't even know your phone number.

It is in the dark times that the light of friendship shines brightest.

It is in the darkest skies that stars are best seen.

It was the first time that I had ever been romantically kissed. It was even better than the chocolate cake.

It's a shame that humans don't come with reset buttons.

It's almost as difficult to believe that someone with so many trials could harbor such hope, as that there are those with so much advantage who harbor such hopelessness.

It's been said that every new beginning in some other beginning's end.

It's our memories that make us who we are. Without them, we're nothing. If that means we have to hurt sometimes, it's worth it.

I've come to know that what we want in life is the greatest indication of who we really are (p. 331).

I've never understood why people said 'in your own words.' Who else's words would I use?

I've wondered why the famous congregate with each other. Perhaps it's to assure each other that they really are as important as they think they are.

I've yet to read a love story that compares with mine.

Joy isn't the natural response to blessings - joy is what comes from acknowledging them.

Leah taught me that the greatest secret of life is that we find exactly what we're looking for. In spite of what happens to us, ultimately we decide whether our lives are good or bad, ugly or beautiful.

Life is not a sprint. It was never meant to be. It is just a step of faith after another.