Quotes from Charles Martin

My life had been characterized by emptiness the size of the Sahara but there, in that moment, in the back of that truck in the armpit of Nicaragua, I wondered—for the first time—if there wasn't a river flowing down deep inside me. If so, the water that would cleanse me was not water from my head—where I'd learned to rationalize my indifference. But water from my heart.

Don't let the fear of what might be rob you of the promise of what can.

We're all broken, all walk with a limp. Here is the truth about you and me: even when in a far-off country, wasted life, stripped bare, smeared, squandered, nothing but scar tissue and shameful, self-inflicted wounds, the love of the Father finds the son and daughter.

Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.

I sat in that room and realized that you can cut off a finger, cut off a hand, even cut off a leg, but if you take a woman's breast, you are cutting more than just a body part.

Stripped bare, the human soul has one real desire: to know and be known.

Pain is weakness leaving your body

Life is a series of hellos and goodbyes. This... is goodbye. But not our last hello.

He traced a line in the dirt with his toe. 'This is a battlefield. Has been since Cain killed Abel. And don't let it get complicated. Gray it ain't. It's black and white. Good versus evil. You might as well choose sides right now.

Sometimes the most courageous thing a man can do is run back across the battlefield and rescue the wounded.

Maybe only an orphan can understand this, but we had been cut free from our anchor and the blow was crushing. We didn't know who we were, and more importantly, we didn't know whose we were -- forever proving that identity precedes purpose. You can't know who you are until you've settled whose you are. [Bones, to Murphy Shepherd, about himself and his brother Frank]

The heart is not only the most unselfish of organs, it is also the most courageous and faithful.