Dean Koontz Quotes

I don't allow flying nuns in my convent," she said. "They tend to be frivolous, and during night flight, they're prone to crashing through windows.

The fog that slowly tumbled like great masses of dripping white laundry gradually gave way to sheer curtains and then to isolated tattered scraps.

What matters is the day at hand and what we do with it, one day at a time, some butter-side-down days, some butter-side-up. And what should we do with the day?

At fifty-one, why would she choose to dispose of her house, uproot herself, and come here to be a part of your work if she didn't feel that, for the first time in her life, she was profoundly known for who she is, that she was at last cherished for who she truly is?

In ecstasy, it is essentially not about sensation but about passion, and passion is not of the flesh but of the mind and heart.

She turned to him, shook her head. Her black hair tossed, and the beams of the late-afternoon sunlight played upon it, sending brief ripples of red and green and blue through it the same way that light, shimmering on the black surface of oil, creates short-lived, wriggling rainbows.

Or maybe they were just doing it for fun. A lark. Their religion is tolerant of extreme forms of recreation. Boys will be boys, after all, and sociopathic boys will be sociopathic.

On a small table beside his chair were other haphazardly stacked volumes by such poets as Emerson, Whitman, and Wallace Stevens, a dangerous crew to let into your head.

He felt ... a suspicion-no, a conviction-than he had been abandoned, forgotten, and that no one in the whole world cared or would ever care enough about him to really find out what he was like and what his dreams were. He was an outcast, a creature somehow vastly different from all other people, an object of scorn and derision, an outsider, secretly loathed and ridiculed by everyone who met him, even by those few who professed to love him.

These days, all I ask of Fate is that the people she hurls into my life, whether they are evil or good, or morally bipolar, should be amusing to one degree or another ... Most good people have a sense of humor. The problem is finding smile-inducing evil people, because the evil are mostly humorless.

What we're talking about here is goodness, mercy, and justice- and those are not fantasies. They'll exist whether you believe in them or not. However, if you believe, then you'll put your beliefs in action; and if you act you will help ensure that evil doesn't triumph. But only if you act.

When men in power decide that things need to be rebalanced at any cost, the violence is never brief and never really directed solely at the imbalance that supposedly inspired it. The rule of law becomes the rule of violence. Revenge becomes a synonym for justice. No city is safe from such horror, no nation, no time in all of history. Be ready to recognize the moment. Be always ready.

Ryan's parents, no less than Sam's, were of that portion of the post-war generation that rejected the responsibilities of tradition and embraced entitlement. Sometimes it seemed to him that he was the parent, that his mother and father were the children. Regardless of the consequences of their behavior and decisions, they would see no need for redemption. Giving them the chance to earn it would only offend them.

Mr. Thomas, did you know that in an experiment with a human observer, subatomic particles behave differently from the way they behave when the experiment is observed while in progress and the results are examined, instead, only after the fact?"
"Sure. Everybody knows that."
He raised one bushy eyebrow. "Everybody, you say. Well then you realize what this signifies."
I said, "At least on an subatomic level, human will can in part shape reality.

From birth to death we explore and seek, and in the end we arrive where we started, the past having made one great slow turn on a carousel to become our future, and if we have learned anything worth learning, the carousel will bring us to the one place we most need to be.

If our current barbaric world spirals into greater corruption and brutality, our descendants may become so cruel and so morally perverse that they cross time to watch us suffer, bearing orgasmic witness to the bloodbaths from which their sick civilization grew.

Paper clip. Ping. Disaster. Colonel Bowie is down. Colonel Bowie is down! The Mexican Army is now leaderless. Capone gloats.

Were you always such a snake," the child asked, "or did you grow into what you are?

When she had delight in her heart, her face transcended all her suffering, whereupon the scars and the deformed features and the mottled skin became the remarkable face of a hero and the cherished face of a friend.

I swung up and into this most inadequate of hidey-holes and lowered the lid, closing myself in the feed bin with the hope that its name wouldn't prove to be as apt now as it had been in the past.

If one's friends do not openly laugh at him, they are not in fact his friends.

I come down on the side of free will but I have sympathy for those who believe in fate because there is something about life which we feel we have no control over.

Chronologically she is twelve but emotionally she is older, and intellectually older still.

Envy, envy eats them alive. If you had money, they'd envy you that. But since you don't, they envy you for having such a good, bright, loving daughter. They envy you for just being a happy man. They envy you for not envying them. One of the greatest sorrows of human existence is that some people aren't happy merely to be alive but find their happiness only in the misery of others.

I think the world is an interesting place and I don't think anybody has the firm and final answer to what it is but I kind of assume there's a purpose.

Monkey stalactites

Art is the only answer to chaos and the void.

Merely litter, as if it must have some ominous significance. As it gazed at me from the cupped palm of my right hand, I didn't realize that the sounds of the city were diminishing, until suddenly I became aware that a profound silence had fallen over the alleyway. For an instant, I thought that I had gone deaf, but then I heard myself say, What's happening?

It is the purpose for which we exist. This reckless caring.

The World itself is a wonderland, young man, as you well know.

Him aloof or cold, only shy and on occasion melancholy. Some felt that perhaps in his past lay a tragedy with which he had never been able to make his peace, that the only companion with which he felt comfortable was sorrow. Amalia was somewhat distressed. "Somebody should have cleaned up these dishes and emptied the refrigerator before things in it spoiled. Leaving it like this ... it's just wrong." I shrugged. "Maybe no one cared about him." My sister seemed to care about everyone, even making excuses for our parents at their

Watching the sea as it carried to shore millions of fragments of the sun and cast them, cooled and foaming, on the sand.

I need useful work to keep my mind occupied, but I'd like to find work where it's ... quieter.

On her deathbed ... I tell her she is as good a soul as I have ever met or hope to meet, that she is an angel in the flesh, and that I will speak her name to God every night of my life before I go to sleep.

We were friends, never paramours. A lover who is enigmatic will most likely prove to be a cataclysm waiting to happen. But a charming friend whose usual warmth is raveled through moments of cool inscrutability can be an intriguing companion.

On the third, directly before me, were embedded more polished letters: PER OMNIA SAECULA SAECULORUM.
For ever and ever.
In the red light, the brushed steel glowed softly, like embers. The polish letters blazed.
Without a hiss, For ever and ever slid aside, as though inviting me to eternity.

the worst happens when you least expect it

I'd had much practice turning my mind away from certain memories of my childhood. I could quickly dial her remembered voice from a whisper to a silence.

If you let the news spoil your appetite, there wouldn't be a day you could eat.

Language can't describe reality. Literature has no stable reference, no real meaning. Each reader's interpretation is equally valid, more important than the author's intention. In fact, nothing in life has meaning. Reality is subjective. Values and truths are subjective. Life itself is a kind of illusion. Blah, blah, blah, let's have another scotch.

I am no good alone. I need bonds, vows real if unspoken, shared laughter, and people who depend on me as I depend on them.

I believe our recognition of reality's complex dimensions is a consequence of our solitude.

I am getting the chaos I wanted. The problem is, you can switch the chaos on, but chaos itself is in control of the off switch.

You have to stop worrying about looking foolish, 'cause fear of being humiliated really limits you.

She drove slowly into town as the gold and rose fingers of the dawn reached toward fading stars that eluded them.

The whisper of the dusk
is night shedding its husk.

Maybe magic and love, together, can achieve what magic alone cannot.

Because when you're doing it, then it's just something you do. But
if you talk about it, then it's something you are

Truly tough guys never say they're tough.

There are other worlds to sing in.

Mother seemed to wish that she'd never had a childhood, perhaps because all delight was fleeting and because the promise of one day was not fulfilled even just until the next.

The broom wasn't as comforting as a flamethrower would have been, but it was better than a mop and certainly more threatening than a feather duster.

I'm small, I'm young - and I'm so different. You've always respected that difference, and you've always trusted it. Trust me now. There's a reason I am the way I am, and there's a reason I was born to you. There's always a reason. We belong together.

Their lovemaking was different from any Ryan had known, rich with desire for a perfect union, yet without lust, giving without taking, receiving without wanting. Tender, selfless, almost innocent, this was a sweet commemoration of all they had been to each other to this point in time, to this fulcrum of their lives, and it was a solemnization of a commitment to be two in one henceforth, to be as one, always one, one forever.

Anyway," he said, "if somebody doesn't belong in the world, there's no door they can throw him out. They can't take the world away from him and put him somewhere different. The worst thing they can do is kill him. That's all.

I am my own worst enemy. This, more than any other trait, proves my fundamental humanity.

Sometimes I am hampered by having a moral code, but I have it nonetheless, like a burr under the brain, with no way to pluck it out.

lookout for a retriever with

Humanity is a parade of fools and I'm at the front, twirling a baton

Have fun, entertain yourself with your work, make yourself laugh and cry with your own stories, make yourself shiver in suspense along with your characters. If you can do that, then you will most likely find a large audience; but even if a large audience is never found, you'll have a happy life.

That was the splendid thing about life: Though it was cruel, it was also mysterious, filled with wonder and surprise; sometimes the surprises were so amazing that they qualified as miraculous, and by witnessing those miracles, a despondent person could discover a reason to live, a cynic could obtain unexpected relief from ennui, and a profoundly wounded boy could find the will to heal himself and medicine for melancholy.

Grief is a healthy emotion, and it's healthy to embrace it. By accepting loss, we clarify our values and the meaning of our lives.

Terror and pleasure are linked in us. We are a baldly miswired species, Martie. Terror delights us, both the experience of terror and the dealing out of it to others. We are healthier if we admit to this miswiring and do not struggle to be better than our natures allow.

Boo fell in at my side. He is the only ghost dog I have ever seen. Animals always move on. For some reason he had lingered more than a year at the abbey. Perhaps waiting for me.

We're out of cocktail olives, it's a tragedy of historic proportions, but we're coping because we're Americans.

Evil itself may be relentless. I will grant you that, but love is relentless too. Friendship is a relentless force. Family is a relentless force. Faith is relentless force. The human spirit is relentless, and the human heart outlasts - and can defeat - even the most relentless force of all, which is time.

The only way back from such a bleak despondency is to shape humiliation into humility, to strive always to triumph over the darkness while never forgetting that the honor and the beauty are more in the striving than in the winning. When triumph at last comes, our efforts alone could not have won the day without that grace which surpasses all understanding and which will, if we allow it, imbue our lives with meaning.

For laughter is the perfect medicine for the tortured heart, the balm for misery,

I am the One, the all and the only. I live in the Pendleton as surely as I live everywhere. I am the Pendleton's history and its destiny. The building is my place of conception, my monument, my killing ground.

He'll also cut you some slack if you're astonishingly stupid in an amusing fashion. Granny claimed that this explains why uncountable millions of breathtakingly stupid people get along just fine in life.

Oh, my adorable fry cook, wait till you see them. They're the most hideous, terrifying creatures, and wickedly cunning, and there's ever so much that can go wrong. But what you always know now, what we all know here, is exactly what we're fighting for and how right it is to fight for it.

Now he must deal with the security system, which has recorded everything that he's done. A video camera is mounted over the front door and focused on the cashiers' counter. Edgler Foreman Vess has no desire to see himself on television news. Living with intensity is virtually impossible when one is in prison.

Denial couldn't be maintained.

Being known by everyone is not the same as being loved.

This isn't a reasoned response to a configuration of stars, but the heart cannot flourish on logic alone. Unreason is an essential medicine as long as you don't overdose

Of all the things we can feel with our minds and bodies, severe pain is the purest, for it drives everything else from our awareness and focuses us as perfectly as we can ever be focused.

I have advice for new writers, first of all, at any time in the history of publishing in my experience, there will be endless number people telling you that you can't do what you are trying to do. You won't succeed, there's something else you should be doing.

Never leave a friend behind. Friends are all we have to get us through this life
and they are the only things from this world that we could hope to see in the next.

We can approach belief from an intellectual path, but in the end, God must be taken on faith. Proofs are for things of this world, things in time and of time, not beyond time.

When new hopes fail, old hopes return in the endless cycle of desperation.

The brain acknowledged the approach of death while the heart stubbornly insisted upon immortality.

It's not just that," Chief Porter said. "A guy who once would have raped and killed a woman, now a lot of times he also has to cut off her lips and mail them to us or take her eyes for a souvenir and keep them in his freezer at home. There's more flamboyant craziness these days." Giving the buttered cinnamon roll a reprieve, Ozzie said, "Maybe it's all these superhero movies with all their supervillains. Some psychopath who used to be satisfied raping and murdering, these days he thinks that he should be in a Batman movie, he wants to be the Joker or the Penguin." "No real-life bad guy wants to be the Penguin," I assured him. "Norman Bates was happy just dressing up like his mother and stabbing people," Chief Porter said, "but Hannibal Lecter has to cut off their faces and eat their livers with fava beans. The role models have become more intense.

To have your life blow up four times before you're thirty would take something out of anyone, and I think it drained from my mom just enough hope that she never quite built her confidence back to what it once had been.

That is, Jack thought, the way of life. The horror changes us, because we can never forget. Cursed with memory. It starts when we're old enough to know what death is and realize that sooner or later we'll lose everyone we love. We're never the same. But somehow we're all right. We go on.

When one day ends, the next begins, for in this infinite universe there is no final conclusion to anything, definitely not to hope.

Frightening numbers of people were either easy to deceive or wished ardently to submit to any belief system, no matter how delusional, that reassured them and justified their hatreds.

I'm no more a wonder than anyone. And that's what makes the world magical. Every baby's a seed of wonder - that gets watered or it doesn't.

The why of the mind's existence and the how of its profound capacity to reason - especially its penchant for moral reasoning - will by their very nature remain as mysterious as whatever lies outside of time.

In treacherous currents, she is kept steady by a moral anchor the size of a ship.

Guns don't feel nothin' about you, one way or t'other. No fair reason for you to feel bad towards them.

On those occasions when he had killed in the dark, he later needed to see his victims' faces because, in some unlit corner of his heart, he half expected to find his own face looking up at him, ice-white and dead-eyed. "Deep down," the dream-victim had said, "You know that you're already dead yourself, burnt out inside. You realize that you have far more in common with your victims after you've killed them than before.

Her eyes were clear; she hadn't been crying. She was a cop's wife first, a woman second; she wouldn't give in to tears as long as Wyatt was fighting for his life because she was fighting with him in spirit.

I am the One, and I see all.
But the blind man in Apartment 1-A is blind in many ways, as are all human beings, even those with functioning eyes. They are blind to their folly, to their ignorance, to their history, to the future that they will make for themselves. A future born of self-loathing.

I was learning how people were with one another, how they acted and reacted and interacted, what they said and how they said it, what they wanted, what they hoped for - more than I could learn from books alone.

You can't always win arguments as a writer, but you have to just go ahead and say, well, I'm doing it that way anyway.

The things we regret most in life are the things we don't do.

Any thoughtful physicist, he said, well schooled in quantum mechanics, would agree that all time exists simultaneously, which I subsequently learned was the case. In truth, Father said, as the first instant of the universe, all of time was present, all our yesterdays and today and all our tomorrows, everyone and everything that was and ever would be existed at that moment.

Hope, however, isn't all that's needed to achieve change. Hope is a hand extended, but two hands are required to be pulled out of this deep hole. The second hand was faith ...

I can do what I need to do. I can get where I want to go, no matter how hard it is.

Now take my hand and hold it tight.
I will not fail you here tonight,
For failing you, I fail myself
And place my soul upon a shelf
In Hell's library without light.
I will not fail you here tonight.