John Connolly Quotes

But there were some who went with her willingly, for there are other women who dream of lying with wolves. ~ John Connolly

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. ~ John Connolly

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.... ~ John Connolly

The nature of compassion isn't coming to terms with your own suffering and applying it to others: It's knowing that other folks around you suffer and, no matter what happens to you, no matter how lucky or unlucky you are, they keep suffering. And if you can do something about that, then you do it, and you do it without whining or waving your own fuckin' cross for the world to see. You do it because it's the right thing to do. ~ John Connolly

Some revelations came only with the sound of dirt falling on a coffin:the ones that mattered, the ones that made for regrets. ~ John Connolly

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. ~ John Connolly

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, ~ John Connolly

An interesting thing happened today," she said, giving me just enough time to get the word "hi" out of my mouth. "I opened the front door and there was a man on my doorstep. A big man. A very big, very black man."

"Rachel - "

"You said it would be discreet. His T–shirt had the words 'Klan Killer' written on the front."

"I - "

"And do you know what he said?"

I waited.

"He handed me a note from Louis and told me he was lactose intolerant. That was it. Note. Lactose intolerant. Nothing else. He's coming to the reading with me. It was all I could do to get him to change his T–shirt. The new one reads 'Black Death.' I'm going to tell people it's a rap band. Do you think it's a rap band?"

I figured it was probably his occupation, but I didn't say that. Instead, I said the only thing I could think of to say.

"Maybe you'd better buy some soy milk."

She hung up without saying good–bye. ~ John Connolly

Misery loved company, but damnation needed it. ~ John Connolly

Before she became ill, David's mother would often tell him that stories were alive. They weren't alive in the way that 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 them enough attention. Cats, meanwhile, were very good at pretending people didn't exist at all when it suited them, but that was another matter entirely. ~ John Connolly

His features were smudged and indistinct, as though a thumb had smeared itself across an ink drawing of a face. His ~ John Connolly

Before she came ill, David's mother would often tell him that stories were alive. They weren't alive in the way that people were alive, or even dogs or cats. ( ... ) Stories were different, though: they came alive in the telling. Without a human voice to read them aloud, or a pair of wide eyes following them by torch light beneath a blanket, they had no real existence in our world. ( ... ) They lay dormant, hoping for the chance to emerge. Once someone started to read them, they could begin to change. They could take root in the imagination and transform the reader. Stories wanted to be read, David's mother would whisper. They needed it. It was the reason they forced themselves from their world into ours. They wanted us to give them life. ~ John Connolly

Most criminals were dumb, and he took the view that the whole science of criminology was essentially flawed, since much of its theory was based on the study of criminals who had been caught, and were therefore either stupid or unlucky, as opposed to the study of those who had not been caught, and were therefore smart and had a little luck on their side, but just a little. Luck ran out, but smart was for life. ~ John Connolly

Whimsical people were the type who got run over by cars without anybody really noticing or caring that much beyond the damage to the vehicle, which was usually minimal anyway, whimsical folk being kind ~ John Connolly

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. ~ John Connolly

No matter how hard Evil tries, it can never quite match up to the power of Good, because Evil is ultimately self-destructive. Evil may set out to corrupt others, but in the process corrupts itself. ~ John Connolly

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. ~ John Connolly

And I knew, too, that to live a life like Walter Cole's - a life almost mundane in the pleasure it derived from small happinesses and the beauty of the familiar, but uncommon in the value it attached to them - was something to be envied. ~ John Connolly

although his physician had advised him not to be overly concerned about forgetting facts and names, and he should begin to worry only if he stopped noticing that he couldn't remember them - if, in essence, he forgot that he was forgetting. ~ John Connolly

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

A demon obsessed with being human is a demon no longer ~ John Connolly

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. ~ John Connolly

Books are constantly changing the world. If you're a Christian, you have been changed by the Bible, by the word of God, or what was left of it when it was finally wrung through the hands of men. If you are a Muslim, look to the Koran; if a Communist, to Marx and Engels. Don't you see? This world is constantly being altered by books. ~ John Connolly

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

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. ~ John Connolly

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

I don't think you can dial 911 for a literary emergency. ~ John Connolly

Dr. Ryley. Mrs. Schneider looked a little surprised, then took on the role of hostess, pouring my coffee, offering sugar, cream. She pressed cookies on me, ~ John Connolly

We are not meant to know the time or the nature of our deaths (for all of us secretly hope that we may be immortal). ~ John Connolly

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

All great art commences with a vision, and perhaps it may be that the vision is closer to God than that which is ultimately created by the artist's brush. There will always be human flaws in the execution. Only in the mind can the artist achieve true perfection. ~ John Connolly

There was a lot to be said for a man's capacity to be comfortable while alone. ~ John Connolly

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. ~ John Connolly

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

Paunch lapping at his belt like a pale tongue, peeping out from beneath the fabric of his golf shirt, hairy and somehow obscene. He was ~ John Connolly

Sometimes we need our pain. We need it to call our own. ~ John Connolly

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. ~ John Connolly

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. ~ John Connolly

He will say less than he means, and conceal more than he reveals. ~ John Connolly

Henry VIII, for example, who was king of England from 1509 to 1547, ended his days surrounded by a great many young people for the simple reason that he'd had most of his old courtiers exiled or executed. Between the years 1532 and 1540 alone, Henry ordered 330 political executions, probably more than any other ruler in British history. If you worked for Henry VIII, then you really didn't need to worry about putting money into your pension fund as you probably wouldn't live long enough to spend it. ~ John Connolly

He had never really speculated about this before, since demons came in all shapes and sizes. Indeed, some of them came in more than one shape or size all by themselves, such as O'Dear, the Demon of People Who Look in Mirrors and Think They're Overweight, and his twin, O'Really, the Demon of People Who Look in Mirrors and Think They're Slim When They're Not. ~ John Connolly

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. ~ John Connolly

The beam caught the bowed head of Angel. He glanced up into Bobby Sciorra's eyes and smiled. Sciorra looked puzzled for a moment and then his mouth opened in slow-dawning realization. He was already turning to try to locate Louis when the darkness seemed to come alive around him and his eyes widened as he realized, too late, that death had come for him too. ~ John Connolly

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 ~ John Connolly

In the space of one night, [I] had gone through the possessions of my dead wife and child, sorting, discarding, smelling the last traces of them that clung to their clothing like the ghosts of themselves. ~ John Connolly

As I get older I tend to rail against the world more and more. ~ John Connolly

These stories were very old, as old as people, and they had survived because they were very powerful indeed. They were the tales that echoed in the head long after the books that contained them were cast aside. They were both an escape from reality and an alternative reality themselves. They were so old, and so strange, that they had found a kind of existence independent of the pages they occupied. The world of the old tales existed parallel to ours, but sometimes the walls separating the two became so thing and brittle that the two worlds started to blend into each other. That was when the trouble started. That was when the bad things came. That was when the Crooked Man began to appear to David. ~ John Connolly

[H]e looked like a real bruiser as he stepped from his car, his big sunglasses giving the impression that a large bug had evolved to the point that it could wear a suit. ~ John Connolly

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. ~ John Connolly

Because to ignore what had happened in the recent and distant pasts, to turn away and look elsewhere because it was easier to do so, was to be an accomplice to the crimes that were committed. To refuse to delve deeper would be to collude with the offenders. ~ John Connolly

I used to think this was all about good and evil," said Rickett, "but it's not."
"No?"
"There's a kind of evil that isn't even in opposition to good, because good is an irrelevance to it. It's a foulness that's right at the heart of existence, born with the stuff of the universe. It's in the decay to which all things tend. It is, and it always will be, but in dying we leave it behind."
"And while we're alive?"
"We set our souls against it, and our saints and angels, too." He patted Parker on the shoulder. "Especially the destroying ones. ~ John Connolly

lagophthalmos - a ~ John Connolly

He had a love of books, for in books was recorded the knowledge of all those who had gone before him. ~ John Connolly

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. ~ John Connolly

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. ~ John Connolly

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. ~ John Connolly

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. ~ John Connolly

So what you gonna do?"

"Push a stick into the beehive and rustle up some bees. The Larousses are hosting a party today. I think we should avail ourselves of their hospitality."

"We got an invite?"

"Has not having one ever stopped us before?"

"No, but sometimes I just like to be invited to shit, you know what I'm sayin', instead of havin' to bust in, get threatened, irritate the nice white folks, put the fear of the black man on them."

He paused, seemed to think for a while about what he had just said, then brightened.

"Sounds good, doesn't it?" I said.

"Real good," he agreed. ~ John Connolly

Dogs were generally incompatible with melancholy. ~ John Connolly

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. ~ John Connolly

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

Sometimes he would forget her, but in forgetting he would remember her again, and the ache for her would return with a vengeance. ~ John Connolly

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 ~ John Connolly

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. ~ John Connolly

We're the world's leading producer of serial killers. It's a sign of sickness, is what it is. We're sick and weak and these killers are like a cancer inside us: the faster we grow, the quicker they multiply. ~ John Connolly

That evening, as he got ready for bed, he heard his mother and father talking in their bedroom, and that was how he learned that Billy had been naked when he was discovered and that the police had arrested a man who lived with his mother in a clean little house not far from where the body was found. David knew from the way they were talking that something very bad had happened to Billy before he died, something to do with the man from the clean little house.
...
Now, in another bedroom, he thought of Jonathan Tulvey and Anna, and wondered if a man from a clean little house, a man who lived with his mother and kept sweets in his pockets, had made them go down with him to the railroad tracks.
And there, in the darkness, he had played with them, in his way. ~ John Connolly

He would envy each and every living thing its freedom, even if it was only the freedom to die. ~ John Connolly

Wanted to talk to them. I wanted to tell them that I was sorry. I wanted to say what every child wishes to say to his parents when they're gone and it's too late to say anything at all: that I loved them, and had always loved them. ~ John Connolly

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

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

He understood the half-life of hope: it is not despair that destroys us, but its opposite. Hope is the winding, despair the unwinding. Despair brings with it the possibility of an ending. Taken to the extreme, its logical conclusion is death. But hope sustains. It can be exploited. Ormsby ~ John Connolly

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

The four ages of man, as far as Williamson was concerned, were confusion, anger, complacency, and grumpiness, but it was important to embrace them in the right order. The ~ John Connolly

The hatred for ex-soldiers on the part of those who had not fought was something I could not understand. They wanted us to disappear. There were no more parades now, no more kisses on the cheek. Soldiers were no more than beggars, and nobody likes a beggar. Perhaps we made them feel guilty by our presence. They might have preferred it had we all died in the mud and been buried far from England in places whose names we had not even learned to pronounce properly before we perished. ~ John Connolly

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. ~ John Connolly

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. ~ John Connolly

If 'why' was the first and last question, then 'because I was curious to see what would happen' was the first and last answer. A version of it had been spoken to God Himself in the Garden of Eden, and it was destined to be the reason for the end of things at the hands of man. ~ John Connolly

He had found it hard to equate the priest's God with the one who had left his mother to die slowly and painfully. ~ John Connolly

Knew that his God - for each man has his own God - let him wander there sometimes, perhaps with the ghost of one of the many dogs that had kept him company through his life yapping at his heels, flushing the birds from the rushes and chasing them for the joy of it. My grandfather used to say that if God did not allow a ~ John Connolly

"Sarge, mr. Nurd here is threatening to turn me to jelly."
"really?" said Sarge. "what flavor? ~ John Connolly

You don't have much faith in people, do you?' asked David. 'I don't have much faith in anything,' Roland replied. 'Not even in myself. ~ John Connolly

If you're getting fucked, then you're getting fucked. But if you're getting fucked by someone who's smiling, then you're really getting fucked. ~ John Connolly

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. ~ John Connolly

Warraner looked pleasantly surprised at the question, like a Mormon who had suddenly found himself invited into a house for coffee, cake, and a discussion of the wit and wisdom of Joseph Smith. ~ John Connolly

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. ~ John Connolly

We must have taken a wrong turn turning somewhere."
"Where, Purgatory?" said Dozy. "We're in Hell. ~ John Connolly

Why did you shoot him?"
"You weren't around," I replied, my teeth gritted in pain. "If you'd been here I'd have shot you instead. ~ John Connolly

And I told him that I believed in God because I had seen His opposite. I had seen all that He was not, and been touched by it, and so I could no more deny the possibility of an ultimate goodness to set against such depravity than I could deny that daylight followed darkness, and night the day. ~ John Connolly

If you listen hard enough, there's almost no such thing as silence: there's just noise that isn't very loud yet. ~ John Connolly

one ignored the mundane at one's peril. After ~ John Connolly

In later life, people will be impressed that you can quote Shakespeare, and you will sound very intelligent. It's harder to quote trigonometry, or quadratic equations, and not half as romantic. ~ John Connolly

It is one thing to be brave in front of others, perhaps for fear of being branded a coward and becoming diminished in their eyes, but another entirely to be brave when there is nobody to witness your courage. The latter is an elemental bravery, a strength of spirit and character. ~ John Connolly

No book is really a fixed object. Every reader reads a book differently, and each book works in a different way on each reader. ~ John Connolly

In the old house, the past hung in the air like motes of dust waiting to be illuminated by the sharp rays of memory ~ John Connolly

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

There is a dark resource within all of us, a reservoir of hurt and pain and anger upon which we can draw when the need arises. Most of us rarely, if ever, have to delve too deeply into it. That is as it should be, because dipping into it costs and you lose a little of yourself each time, a small part of all that is good and honorable and decent about you. Each time you use it you have to go a little deeper, a little further down into the blackness. Strange creatures move through its depths, illuminated by a burning light from within and fueled only by the desire to survive and to kill. The danger in diving into that pool, in drinking from that dark water, is that one day you may submerge yourself so deeply that you can never find the surface again. Give in to it and you're lost forever. ~ John Connolly

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. ~ John Connolly

The snow fell straight and slow, adding another layer to the drifts and covering roads, trees, bushes, and bodies, the living and the dead as one beneath its veil. ~ John Connolly

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

Men and men, men and women, whatever the permutation, in the end one partner usually feels more than the other and that partner usually suffers for it. ~ John Connolly