John Connolly Quotes

After all, no relationship could function or survive under the burden of total honesty.

I'd been hurt, and in response I had acted violently, destroying a little of myself each time I did so.

Astronomers who were recently sifting through thousands of signals from Sagittarius B2, a big dust cloud at the center of our galaxy, found a substance there called ethyl formate, which is the chemical responsible for the flavor of raspberries, and the smell of rum, the drink popular with pirates. Therefore, our galaxy tastes a bit of raspberries and smells of rum, which is nice.

gazing upon him with eyes that were too old for her face.

You cannot perform acts of evil in the name of a greater good, because the good suffers. It is corrupted by what has been done in its name.

No, all that David could think about was the head of the deer-girl, for her face rubbed against his as they rode, her warm blood smeared his cheek, and he saw himself reflected in the dark green mirrors of her eyes.

One lies in truth,
One truth is lies.
One path is death,
One path is life.
One question asked,
The path to guide.

Prepare for the worst and you won't be disappointed.

Come on, I said a third time, to the approaching darkness, to the figures that beckoned from within it, to the peace that comes at last to every dead thing.

In any given situation, the most difficult step is to reach a decision. Once a decision is made, control can be asserted.

I thought it was her wicked stepmother who poisoned her ... '
' ... Turned out the wicked stepmother had an alibi.'
' ... Seems she was off poisoning someone else at the time. Chance in a million, really. It was just bad luck.

Although it was cold out, he opened the window slightly because the room smelled of sleep. The action dislodged something red and black from the frame,

When one encounters enough strangeness, then what is strange ultimately becomes familiar.
The mind can accommodate itself to almost anything, given time: pain, grief, loss, even the possibility that the dead talk to the living.

One of the detectives was later heard to comment that Perry Reed was officially in more trouble than any other single human being he'd ever encountered in the course of his entire career....

Every individual spends a lifetime trying to disprove Copernicus by placing him- or herself at the heart of existence, but a small core of diehards manages to turn it into an art.

The child's face is close to her own now, but there is still no detail. It is a blur, a watercolor painting left out in the rain, the shades running, blending into one another. Only the eyes remain clear; black and hungry, jealous of life.

I find that I take a great deal of pleasure knowing I get up people's noses to some degree.

The trick was not to stifle the emotions, but to control them. Love, anger, grief – all were weapons in their way, but they needed to be kept in check.

Slow animals always become prey in the end.

He has his father's distinctive good looks, like a badly made crash test dummy. He also smells like a funeral parlor, but that may be incidental.

Aside. "How long will it take?" He was scared, and he wasn't pretending. "Not long," I said. "Not long at all." You

Quayle himself was a surprisingly elegant man of sixty winters or more. (One might equally have said "sixty springs" or "sixty summers," but that would have been inaccurate, for Quayle was a man of bare trees and frozen water.)

You can't prove that something doesn't exist. You can only prove that something does exist.

He'd eat it, though, and not just because he was hungry. He'd have eaten it even if Hayley Conyer had force-fed him caviar and foie gras during their meeting. He'd eat it because his wife had prepared it for him.

As he listened to her, David wondered again how Jonathan could have betrayed this girl. He must have been so angry and so sad, and that anger and sadness had consumed him.

Now that it's time to leave, I'm not sure I wan to go.

The evolutionary curve obviously sloped pretty gently where Six came from.

I was a child who loved books, and I am an adult who is the product of books.

Behold not Death's Heads til thou doest not see them, nor look upon mortifying objects til thou overlook'st them.

There are some truths so terrible that they should not be spoken aloud, so appalling that even to acknowledge them is to risk sacrificing a crucial part of one's humanity, to exist in a colder, crueler world than before.

At the Oceana Apartments, he recollects leaving England in triumph, infused with a joy he has not felt in many years. England has reinvigorated them. England has given them hope.

But hope is a candle.

Hope burns, and then it is gone.

Funny, that. For so long Wormwood had desired the throne and then, when he'd had it, it hadn't been worth desiring after all.

Books are not fixed objects: they transmit words and ideas. Their effect on each reader is unique. They put pictures in our minds. They take root. You

There are places where years have no meaning, where only a hair's breadth of history separates the present from the past. Standing there on that bleak hillside, a young man in a place where other young men had died, it was possible to feel a connection to that past, a sense that in some place further back on the the stream of time these young men were still fighting, and still dying, that they would always be fighting this battle, in this place, over and over again, with ever the same end.

A little girl was threatened by a wolf while walking through the forest, and as she fled from him she met a woodsman with an ax, but in this story the woodsman did not merely kill the wolf and restore the girl to her family, oh no. He cut off the wolf's head, then brought the girl to his cottage in the thickest, darkest part of the forest, and there he kept her until she was old enough to wed him, and she became his bride in a ceremony conducted by an owl, even though she had never stopped crying for her parents in all the years that he had kept her prisoner. And she had children by him, and the woodsman raised them to hunt wolves and to seek out people who strayed from the paths of the forest. They were told to kill the men and take what was valuable from their pockets, but to bring the women to him.

The past never truly dies. It is there, waiting, just below the surface of the now.

V-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y, David explained that without slates on the roof, the rain would get in. In their way, they were just as important as walls. Dr. Moberley asked David if he was afraid of the rain getting in. David told him that he didn't like getting wet. It wasn't so bad outside, especially if you were dressed for it, but most people didn't dress for rain indoors.

A condensed Shakespeare with all of the dull parts removed, leaving only the great moments of drama: ghosts, and bloodied daggers, and dying kings.

does." Not enough of it to avoid dating a jackass like Jeff, but solving other people's problems was often easier than taking care of your own. I considered

Patriots built Auschwitz. You start believing that "my country wrong or right" shit, and it always ends up at the same place: a pit filled with bones.

wants to accept that someone close might have taken his or her own life. Too much blame accrues to those left behind for it to be accommodated so easily.

Good will attract good to itself, and those involved will unite toward a common goal. Evil, in turn, draws evil men, but they will never truly act as one. They will always be distrustful, always jealous. Ultimately, they seek power for themselves alone, and for that reason they will always fall apart at the end.

You must learn to control your impulses," he said. "A sword wants to be used. It wants to draw blood. That is why it was forged, and it has no other purpose in the world. If you do not control it, then it will control you.

I believe in evil because I have touched it, and it has touched me.

Let me tell you the truth about the world to which you so desperately want to return. It is a place of pain and suffering and grief. When you left it, cities were being attacked. Women and children were being blasted to pieces or burned alive by bombs dropped from planes flown by men with wives and children of their own. People were being dragged from their homes and shot in the street. Your world is tearing itself apart, and the most amusing thing of all is that it was little better before the war started. War merely gives people an excuse to indulge themselves further, to murder with impunity. There were wars before it, and there will be wars after it, and in between people will fight one another and hurt one another and maim one another and betray one another, because that is what they have always done.

And even if you avoid warfare and violent death, little boy, what else do you think life has in store for you? You have already seen what it is capable of doing. It took your mother from you, drained her of health and beauty, and then cast her aside like the withered, rotten husk of a fruit. It will take others from you too, mark me. Those whom you care about--lovers, children--will fall by the wayside, and your love will not be enough to save them. Your health will fail you. You will become old and sick. Your limbs will ache, your eyesight will fade, and your skin will grow lined and aged. There will be pains deep within that no doctor will be able to cure. Dise

I was a stranger in a familiar land.

So, how we doin'?"
"Same as usual: dead people, a mystery, more dead people."
"Who we lost?"
"The boy. His guardians. Maybe Elliot Norton."
"Shit, don't sound like we got anybody left. Anyone hires you better leave you your fee in their will.

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Parker felt, not for the first time, as though he had wandered into a ghost story.

Most of the bad situations I've encountered began with the best of intentions.

Look at you," he said. "A fractured man, a broken thing. I asked for money to kill you, but none would give it. Now I understand why. There is no value to you. You're nothing, and therefore nothing is what your life is worth. But I will kill you anyway, out of pity. I

But no one on either side ever forgot that the law was white. Justice might be blind, but the law wasn't. Justice was aspirational, but the law was actual. The law was real. It had uniforms, and weapons. It smelt of sweat and tobacco. It drove a big car with a star on the door. White people had justice. Black folks had the law.

His was a psychological and emotional disturbance of untold, awful depth, mundane and yet tragic in that very ordinariness.

David's mother would often tell him stories were alive. They weren't alive in the way people were alive,or even dogs or cats. People were alive whether you chose to notice them or not, while dogs tended to make you notice them if they decided that you weren't paying enough attention. Cats, meanwhile, were very good at pretending people didn't exist at all when it suited them ...

Here is a truth, a truth by which to live: there is hope. There is always hope. If we choose to abandon it, our souls will turn to ash and blow away. But the soul can burn and not be damned.

He was just a boy wearing pajamas, one slipper, and an old blue dressing gown under a stranger's jacket, and he did not belong anywhere but in his own bedroom.

We haunt ourselves, I sometimes think; or, rather, we choose to be haunted. If there is a hole in our lives, then something will fill it. We invite it inside, and it accepts willingly.

The Detective was different. Not that he wasn't a good man; Willie had heard enough about him to understand that he was the kind who didn't like to turn away from another's pain, the kind who couldn't put a pillow over his ears to drown out the cries of strangers. Those scars he had were badges of courage, and Willie knew that there were others hidden beneath his clothes, and still more deep inside, right beneath the skin and down to the soul. No, it was just that whatever goodness was there coexisted with rage and grief and loss.

Maybe this is common to all those who lose someone whom they have loved deeply. Making contact with another potential partner, another lover, becomes an act of reconstruction, a building not only of a relationship but also of oneself.

Newspaper stories were like newly caught fish, worthy of attention only for as long as they remained fresh, which was not very long at all. They

Frank tried to look like he was wrestling with his conscience, although he couldn't have found his conscience without a shovel and an exhumation order.

On the day of the funeral he had stood behind me in the rain and let the water wash over him, the drops falling from the brim of his hat like tears

The nature of humanity, its essence, is to feel another's pain as one's own, and to act to take that pain away,. There is a nobility in compassion, a beauty in empathy, a grace in forgiveness.

Instead, there was only the kind of silence that comes when someone takes away a clock to be repaired and after a time you become aware of its absence because its gentle, reassuring tick is gone and you miss it so.

I'm not in the business of facilitating the creation of martyrs. That's

A discarded newspaper skimmed the sidewalk with a sound like the whisperings of a dead lover.

The Crooked Man believed that whatever evil lay in men was there from the moment of their conception, and it was only a matter of discovering its nature in a child.

There was a lot to be said for the discipline of married life. It forced one to learn the art of compromise, and to remedy the flaws in one's nature.

Hold him till we get there, comrade," said another, who then appeared to reconsider. "Hang on, how big is he?"
The dwarf examined David. "Not very big," he said. "Dwarf and a half. Dwarf and two-thirds at most.

Warraner would rather have been the king of nothing than the prince of something.

The biggest life change any man would ever experience was the ending of it.

I don't think," he said, "that a vicar is supposed to beat a bishop to death, or even back to death."
Mr. Berkeley looked down upon the remains of Bishop Bernard.
"If anyone asks, we'll say he fell over," he said. "Lots of times.

one ignored the mundane at one's peril. After

She had not given me the cross to keep the bad men away, as a child might have been expected to do. No, in her mind the bad men could not be kept away. They were coming, and they would have to be faced.

The worst thing you can do as a writer is waste people's time.

For in every adult there dwells the child that was, and in every child there lies the adult that will be.

Story!" The dwarf snorted. "You'll be talking about "happily ever after" next. Do we look happy? There's no happily ever after for us. Miserabily ever after, more like.

We face those that we have to face, and there will be times when we must make the choice to act for a greater good, even at risk to ourselves, but we do not lay down our lives needlessly. Each of us has only one life to live, and one life to give.

Okay, I said hoarsely as the blood left my head and headed south for the winter.

Samuel didn't move. 'What will you do if I climb off the bed?'
'Well I can eat you, or I can drag you down to the depths of Hell, never to seen or heard from again. Depends, really.'
'On what?'
'Lost of things: hygiene, for a start. After tasting that sock, I don't fancy eating any part of you, to be honest, so it'll have to be the depths of Hell for you, I'm afraid.

It was an overcast late November morning, the grass splintered by hoarfrost, and winter grinning through the gaps in the clouds like a bad clown peering through the curtains before the show begins.

Deborah Mercier couldn't have looked more like a WASP if her coat had been striped with yellow and her eyes had been on the sides of her head. She

This," said Angel to Louis, "is the best fucking idea anyone ever had since, like, Columbus bought a boat." The two men, along with Parker, were sitting

Anyone who wants bookstores to survive is portrayed as a Luddite who goes around smashing up Kindles.

Without a human voice to read them aloud, or a pair of wide eyes following them by flashlight beneath a blanket, books had no real existence in our world. Like seeds in the beak of a bird waiting to fall to earth, or the notes of a song laid out on a sheet, yearning for an instrument to bring their music into being. they lie dormant hoping for the chance to emerge.They want us to give them life.

It may well be the case that one cannot prove the existence of a nine-eyed, multitentacled pink monster named Herbert, but that does not mean that, somewhere in the universe, there is not a nine-eyed multitentacled pink monster named Herbert wondering why nobody writes to him. Just because he hasn't been seen doesn't mean that he isn't out there. This is known as an inductive argument. But the argument is probable, not definite. If there's actually a pretty good chance he exists, there's at least as good a chance that he doesn't exist. So you can prove a negative, at least as much as you can prove anything at all.

Once upon a time – for that is how all stories should begin – there was a boy who lost his mother.

The law doesn't require truth, only the appearance of it. Most cases simply rest on a version of it that's acceptable to both sides. You want to know the only truth is? Everybody lies.
Elwin Stark

Unless you know the code, it has no meaning.

On more than one occasion David, in his urge to explore the darker corners of the bookshelves, had found himself wearing strands of spider silk in his face and hair, causing the web's creator to scuttle into a corner and crouch balefully, lost in thoughts of arachnoid revenge.

Regrets, Blacksmith, make poor currency. You can't but back with them what you most desire.

I disliked the attitude of those who came up from the cities to hunt - their braggadocio, their faux machismo, the unpleasant transformative effect of guns and camouflage on otherwise unremarkable men, for in my experience it was generally men who hunted in this way.

chased by the shadows of clouds.

You have to understand that only the very worst end up here: the ones whose anger made them kill, and who felt no sorrow or guilt after the act; those so obsessed with themselves that they turned their backs on the sufferings of others, and left them in pain; those whose greed meant that others starved and died. Such souls belong here, because they would find no peace elsewhere. In this place, they are understood. In this place, their faults have meaning. In this place, they belong.

Came from nothing- less than nothing, because the poor always enter this life with their account in deficit, and generally leave it in much the same condition...

This life is filled with threats and danger, David. We face those that we have to face, and there will be times when we must make the choice to act for the greater good, even at risk to ourselves, but we do not lay down our lives needlessly. Each of us has only one life to live, and one life to give. There is no glory in throwing it away where there is no hope.

For a moment they still lived and I experienced their deaths as a fresh loss with each waking, so that I was unsure whether I was a man waking from a dream of death or a dreamer entering a world of loss, a man dreaming of unhappiness or a man waking to grief.

But some gifts are worse than curses, and the dark side of the gift is that they know. The lost, the stragglers, those who should not have been taken but were, the innocents, the struggling, tormented shades, the gathering ranks of the dead, they know. And they come.

The trickster is an important archetype, a mischievous, sometimes malicious creature who survives the challenges of the world through deceit. Despite the damage he causes, he leads those who encounter him to confront their own deficiencies and the deficiencies of the society in which they exist. In other words, even as he tears things down, he leads to the creation of other, better structures in their place. In a sense, he represents the part of the human psyche that is unrestricted by convention, the imaginative capability that enables us to confront, and overcome, our problems.

think you just like tethering goats." "Well, be sure to tell me when your rope begins

If you work at home, you're always on call in a way.