Dean Koontz Quotes

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. ~ Dean Koontz

You don't find life by fleeing from it. ~ Dean Koontz

You should have more faith in fiction. It lets you come sideways at the truth, which is the only way anyone ever gets near it. ~ Dean Koontz

The nip that twitches through your blood is the chill of the sudden suspicion that you are a stranger in a strange land. ~ Dean Koontz

I think there may be more truth in fiction than in real life. Or at least truth condensed so that it's more easily understood. ~ Dean Koontz

My wife, who is the linchpin of my life, claims that I have a presence much bigger than my physique. She says that people measure me by the impression I make on them.
I find this notion ludicrous. It is bullshit born of love. ~ Dean Koontz

Greater self-awareness," he'd told Rocky on a night when sleep wouldn't come, "doesn't make a species any happier, pal. If it did, we'd have fewer psychiatrists and barrooms ... ~ Dean Koontz

When balancing a bottle of nitroglycerin on the point of a sword, never complicate the task by trying to tap dance. ~ Dean Koontz

Life would be easy if common sense ruled; but sometimes the easy way doesn't feel like the right way. ~ Dean Koontz

If you really truly want to know, I've thought if I was ever free someday, I might discover I've held my tears so long that I can't cry anymore, that I'm a dry stone and nothing can ever be wrung from me. ~ Dean Koontz

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. ~ Dean Koontz

People who go to work every day, make sacrifices to raise families, and get through life without hurting other people if they can help it-those are the real heros. ~ Dean Koontz

Delayed gratification."
"Yeah, it makes things sweeter."
"Wait too long, and what was sweet and creamy can turn sour. ~ Dean Koontz

Given enough time, you could convince yourself that loneliness was something better, that it was solitude, the ideal condition for reflection, even a kind of freedom.
Once you were thus convinced, you were foolish to open the door and let anyone in, not all the way in. You risked the hard-won equilibrium, that tranquility that you called peace ~ Dean Koontz

journeying through the fields of evil is the price we pay for free will, ~ Dean Koontz

The chief characteristics of my childhood were an aching loneliness and the daily struggle to avoid a bleakness of spirit that unrelieved loneliness can foment. ~ Dean Koontz

The idea that there's good and evil knowledge ... well, that's strictly a religious point of view. Actions can be either moral or immoral, yes, but knowledge can't be labeled that way. To a scientist, to any educated man or woman, all knowledge is morally neutral. ~ Dean Koontz

Even if God exists, does He know that you do? ~ Dean Koontz

What really holds their marriage together are mutual respect of an awesome depth, a shared sense of humor, faith that they were brought together by a force greater than themselves, and a love so unwavering and pure that it is sacred. ~ Dean Koontz

I am such a nonentity by the standards of our culture that People magazine not only will never feature a piece about me but might also reject my attempts to subscribe to their publication on the grounds that the black-hole gravity of my noncelebrity is powerful enough to suck their entire enterprise into oblivion. ~ Dean Koontz

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

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. ~ Dean Koontz

He believed that a burger joint ought to look like a join, not like a surgery, not like a nursery with pictures of clowns and funny animals on walls, not like a bamboo pavilion on a tropical island, not like a glossy plastic replica of a 1950s diner that never actually existed. If you were going to eat charred cow smothered in cheese, with a side order of potato strips made as crisp as ancient papyrus by immersion in boiling oil, and if you were going to wash it all down with either satisfying quantities of icy beer or a milkshake containing the caloric equivalent of an entire roasted pig, then this fabulous consumption ought to occur in an ambience that virtually screamed guilty pleasure, if not sin. ~ Dean Koontz

The greatest minds are like film, they take the negatives and develop themselves in darkness ... ~ Brandi L. Bates

Mr. Thomas, any scientist will tell you that in nature many systems appear to be chaotic, but when you study them long enough and closely enough, strange order always underlies the appearance of chaos. ~ Dean Koontz

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. ~ Dean Koontz

I pushed the door inward. It moved as smoothly, as silently as the mechanism of a well-crafted, spring-loaded trap. ~ Dean Koontz

There are days when it seems to me that in literature the most convincing depiction of the world in which we live is to be found in the phantasmagorical kingdom through which Lewis Carroll took Alice on a tour. ~ Dean Koontz

The only reason I would write a sequel is if I were struck by an idea that I felt to be equal to the original. Too many sequels diminish the original. ~ Dean Koontz

The more familiar that a place becomes, the more mysterious it becomes, as well, if you are alert to the truth of things. I have found this to be the case all of my life. ~ Dean Koontz

Keep busy, Granny Sugars used to say, even if with poker, fighting, and fast cars, because idleness will get you in worse trouble. ~ Dean Koontz

I fall down on the side of free will, simply because if you look at where I came from, and what I was able to do in my life, what was able to happen. ~ Dean Koontz

Hand-to-hand combat with three hundred pounds of screaming monkey menace is not my idea of a fair fight. My idea of a fair fight is one unarmed, toothless, nearsighted old monkey versus me with a Blackhawk attack helicopter. ~ Dean Koontz

In time she said, "I love you, Oddie."
My voice was thick when I replied. "I love you more than life."
"We'll be okay," she said.
"We are okay."
"We're weird and screwed-up, but we're okay," she agreed.
"If someone invented a thermometer that measured weirdness, it would melt under my tongue. But you-you're cool. ~ Dean Koontz

In certain fiction, she perceives truths that she rarely finds in nonfiction; therefore, in her quest to better understand the world and the meaning of her life, she reads those novels that suggest a world of wonders, dark and light, forever unfolding for eyes willing to see. ~ Dean Koontz

Hope is a constant companion in this life. It is the one thing that neither cruel nature, God, nor other men can wrench from us. Health, wealth, beloved brothers and sisters, children, friends, the past, the future - all can be stolen from us as easily as an unguarded purse. But our greatest treasure, hope, remains. It is a sturdy little motor within, purring, ticking, driving us on when reason would suggest surrender. It is both the most pathetic and noblest thing about us, the most absurd and the most admirable quality we possess, for as long as we have hope, we also have the capacity for love, for caring, for decency. ~ Dean Koontz

life is more than intelect ~ Dean Koontz

Thanks to the circus between my ears, I can seize upon the smallest disquieting observation and from it extrapolate a terror of cataclysmic proportions. ~ Dean Koontz

tomorrow is a slave to yesterday. ~ Dean Koontz

A short-order cook, just off work, makes easy tracking for lions and worse ~ Dean Koontz

Being paid well for something you love to do - it's a grace. ~ Dean Koontz

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. ~ Dean Koontz

Perhaps everything else that mattered in a relationship grew from trust - from a tranquil faith in the courage, integrity, and kindness of the other person. ~ Dean Koontz

Mercy is a concept embraced by the weak, and I am not weak. ~ Dean Koontz

I said what might have been a bad word meaning excrement, but I hope that I used a polite synonym. ~ Dean Koontz

Dean Koontz is good in the silence makes silence... then he just attacks!
- WOW ~ Deyth Banger

All death matters."
"Only to the living. ~ Dean Koontz

News is never all the news, only what they want to show you, ~ Dean Koontz

Life's about living and being happy, not about dying. ~ Dean Koontz

Words are the wellspring of the world, and language is the most powerful weapon in the ancient and still unfolding war between truth and lies. ~ Dean Koontz

On Christmas Eve, my mother and I and Teddy and Anita went to Mass together. The shadowy church was lit only by an overhead light trained on the altar and by the flames of hundreds of flickering candles in glass cups set all around the nave. If you squinted, the columns and vaults seemed to melt away, all the grandness of the architecture receded, and the space became intimate, almost as if you were cast back many centuries to a humble place where a miracle had occurred, where the radiance issued not from candles but from the air itself, back to a less hectic era before the invention of clocks, to a night of peace from which a renewed world would then begin to date itself. ~ Dean Koontz

In a universe in which past, present, and future came into existence all at once, complete from beginning to end, with all possible outcomes of every life woven through the tapestry, there is no chance, only choice, no luck, but only consequences. ~ Dean Koontz

A sixth sense is a miraculous thing, which in itself suggests a supernatural order. The human intellect, however, for all its power and triumphs, is largely formed by this world and is therefore corruptible. ~ Dean Koontz

They excrete in the same water where they eat, and they eat in the semen-clouded water where they fornicate. Fish are disgusting. ~ Dean Koontz

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. ~ Dean Koontz

Regardless of how hard the winds of chance might blow or how heavy the weight of experience might become, Stormy always stays on her feet ... ~ Dean Koontz

In the belly of Leviathan, Mr Thomas, one can either despair and perish, or be cheerful and persevere. ~ Dean Koontz

Sometimes I think there may be more truth in fiction than in real life. Or at least truth condensed so that it's more easily understood - Addison Goodheart pg. 84 ~ Dean Koontz

Our nature and purpose is, more than anything else, to love and to make love, to take joy from the beauty of the world, to live with an awareness that the future is not as real a place for any one of us as are the present and the past. ~ Dean Koontz

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. ~ Dean Koontz

Amazement and astonishment express the momentary overwhelming of the mind by something beyond expectation. Amazement is an emotional response, astonishment an intellectual one. ~ Dean Koontz

That night, the sky poured out such torrents that the city was a drum set, every surface a source of rhythms, pavements and windows and canvas awnings, street signs and parked cars, Dumpsters throbbing like tom-toms, garbage-can lids swishing as the wind swirled bursts of rain in imitation of a drummer brush-stroking the batter head of a snare. ~ Dean Koontz

In a clutch or a corner, I tend to make a weapon out of what is near at hand. That can be anything from a crowbar to a cat, though if I had a choice, I would prefer an angry cat, which I have found to be more effective than a crowbar.

Although weaponless, I left the house by the back door, with two chocolate-pumpkin cookies. It's a tough world out there, and a man has to armor himself against it however he can. ~Odd Thomas ~ Dean Koontz

I could live with one butt cheek - just sit at a slant for the rest of my life, not worry about how baggy the seat of my blue jeans looked, get used to the nickname Halfass - but I couldn't live with my brains blown out. ~ Dean Koontz

To the police," Lily said [speaking of five murders], "these five brutal murders are less than coincidence. One of them told me, 'There's no conspiracy, Lily. It's just life.' How do they come to think this way
that death is life? That unnatural death and murder are somehow a natural part of life? ~ Dean Koontz

We are impatient for the future and try to craft it with our own powers, but the future will come as it comes and will not be hurried. If we are good at waiting, we discover that what we wanted of the future, in our impatience, is no longer what we want, that waiting has brought wisdom. ~ Dean Koontz

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. ~ Dean Koontz

No one's more dangerous than a man who's convinced of his own moral superiority. ~ Dean Koontz

Fate cannot be sidestepped or outrun. ~ Dean Koontz

There is no adult terror equivalent to what an innocent child experiences when first confronted with the truth that evil is not merely a figment of fairy tales, that it walks the world in countless forms, and that what it seeks most aggressively is the destruction of the innocent. ~ Dean Koontz

Most people can't wait to leave kidhood behind. But I keep the kid in my heart, you know, and once in a while she gets out. It's a writer thing. The past is material. You never want to forget it, how it was, how it felt. ~ Dean Koontz

Their melancholy drains me. Their need exhausts me. I am wrung by pity. Sometimes it seems that to exit this world, they must go through my heart, leaving it scarred and sore. ~ Dean Koontz

Reality is perception perception change ... reality is fluid so if by reality you mean reliably tangible objects and immutable events then theres no such thing ~ Dean Koontz

Each reader needs to bring his or her own mind and heart to the text. ~ Dean Koontz

The killer walked with a light step that could be achieved only by someone not weighed down with a conscience, and went out into the night's embrace. ~ Dean Koontz

Roots like an oak tree, Barney." He ~ Dean Koontz

Not everything that happens during the day is an open portending a good or evil development in the future, but everything has meaning to one degree or another, for the world is an ever-weaving tapestry from which no thread can be pulled without destroying the integrity of the cloth. ~ Dean Koontz

Action. Action, shaped by intelligence and a moral perspective, is the answer to most problems. ~ Dean Koontz

The dead can be even more frustrating to deal with than are many of the living, which is astonishing when you consider it's the living who run the Department of Motor Vehicles. ~ Dean Koontz

Dean Koontz always find way out of the horror and when it's about silence he should be the first image. ~ Deyth Banger

War," Pax said, "either dulls the mind to despair or sharpens it toward intuitive truths. ~ Dean Koontz

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

The life of a seamstress is no smaller than the life of a queen, the life of a child with Down syndrome no less filled with promise than the life of a philosopher, because the only significant measure of your life is the positive effect you have on others, either by conscious acts of will or by unconscious example. ~ Dean Koontz

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

Its immeasurably easier to live in a world that's all surfaces, that means nothing and demands nothing of you. ~ Dean Koontz

How have you kept yourself as yourself all these years? 'Books,' the boy said. 'Thousands of books.' 'They must have been the right books.' 'Some were, some weren't. You figure out which are which.' 'How do you figure it out?' 'At first by how you feel.' 'And later?' 'By reading what's there on the page and also what's not.' 'Between the lines,' she said. 'Under the lines,' he said. -Annamaria and Timothy -Odd Apocalypse by Dean Koontz pg 328 chapter 49 ~ Dean Koontz

Hope is the destination that we seek.
Love is the road that leads to hope.
Courage is the motor that drives us.
We travel out of darkness into faith. ~ Dean Koontz

Dogs needed no words to console you. Dogs were the ultimate practitioners of the therapy of touch. Dogs knew and accepted the hard realities of life that human beings could not acknowledge until those obvious truths were exhaustively described with words, and even then there was often more bitter acknowledgment than humble acceptance. ~ Dean Koontz

With a cry of alarm, he bolted to the bathroom and made it with not a second to spare. He seemed to be on the throne long enough to have witnessed the rise and fall of an empire. ~ Dean Koontz

One thing seemed to suggest that I might have some wisp of beauty to offer the world: the nature of my heart, which remained free of bitterness and anger. I feared, but I did not hate. I knew dread, but I did not judge. I loved and wished to be loved in return. And though my life had been circumscribed, though my experience had been limited by the threats I faced, I was usually happy. In this world, where woe and misery were common, where sometimes darkness seemed about to drown civilization, perhaps a capacity for happiness and hope was beauty of a kind, a small welcome light in the flood. ~ Dean Koontz

From time to time, things in this world fall out of harmony, and there is a need to synchronize. ~ Dean Koontz

I possess everyone who sleeps in the motor court, roam their memories, and embed recurrent nightmares that will destroy their sleep for weeks after I've departed them."
"I'd prefer a free continental breakfast. ~ Dean Koontz

Your this beautiful ship that will sail a long way, and I'd only be your anchor"
"A ship without an anchor can never be at rest ~ Dean Koontz

Anyway, knowledge isn't wisdom, and we aren't here just to stuff ourselves with facts and figures. We are given this life so we might earn the next; the gift is a chance to grow in spirit, and knowledge is one of the many nutrients that facilitate our growth. ~ Dean Koontz

One reason Elvis mattered, she said, was that in his prime, pop music had still been politically innocent, therefore deeply life-affirming, therefore relevant. By the time he died, most pop songs had become, usually without the conscious intention of those who wrote and sang them, anthems endorsing the values of fascism, which remains the case to this day. ~ Dean Koontz

I think Judy Blume, Stephen King, and Dean Koontz are the three authors responsible for my being where I am today. I owe them a lot. ~ James Dashner

In eighty-six years, child, I've learned the world is a far more mysterious place than most people realize and that every moment of life is woven through with meaning. ~ Dean Koontz

Nothing is one hundred percent reliable this side of paradise, except that your cell-phone provider will never fulfill the service promises that you were naïve enough to believe. ~ Dean Koontz

Not many years ago, nearly 100 percent of people who thought they were being constantly watched were certifiable paranoids. But recently it was revealed that, in the name of public safety, Homeland Security and more than a hundred other local, state, and federal agencies are operating aerial surveillance drones of the kind previously used only on foreign battlefields - at low altitudes outside the authority of air-traffic control. Soon, the bigger worry will not be that, as you walk your dog, you are secretly being watched but that the rapidly proliferating drones will begin colliding with one another and with passenger aircraft, and that you'll be killed by the plummeting drone that was monitoring you to be sure that you picked up Fido's poop in a federally approved pet-waste bag. ~ Dean Koontz

One of those librarians who rules the stacks with an intimidating scowl, whispers quiet sharply enough to lacerate the tender inner tissues of the ear, and will pursue an overdue-book fine with the ferocity of a rabid ferret. ~ Dean Koontz