Dean Koontz Quotes - Page 2

None of us can ever save himself; we are the instruments of one another’s salvation, and only by the hope that we give to others do we lift ourselves out of the darkness into light.
Dean Koontz
Even the wisest and the best of us can be foolish occasionally.
Dean Koontz
You do what you have to do. That's who you seem to be to me, anyway. You're one who does what he has to do.
Dean Koontz
Her eyes were celadon saucers but bottomless, of such great depth that she could take in the knowledge of whole worlds and have room in that gaze for still more.
Dean Koontz
Her direct stare probed, as if the story of my life were written in my eyes in a few succinct lines that she could read.
Dean Koontz
People existed, however, who believed that closet racist were everywhere around them. They needed to believe this in order to have prupose and meaning in their lives, and to have someone to hate.
Dean Koontz
Fire, ice, asteroids and pole shifts are bogeymen with which we distract ourselves from the real threat of our time. In an age when everyone invents his own truth, there is no community, only factions. Without community, there can be no consensus to resist the greedy, the envious, the power-mad narcissists who seize control and turn the institutions of civilization into a series of doom machines.
Dean Koontz
This may be the primary purpose of dogs: to restore our sense of wonder and to help us maintain it, to make us consider that we should trust our intuition as they trust theirs and to help us realize that a thing known intuitively can be as real as anything known by material experience.
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
She might have been born this way, without an empathy gene and other essentials. In that case, she would interpret any kindness as weakness. Among predatory beasts, any display of weakness is an invitation to attack.
Dean Koontz
Free will," she agreed, "our greatest gift, the thing that makes life worth living, in spite of all the anguish it brings.
Dean Koontz
All these girls swooning over hunky vampires, what they really want is to give away their freedom, to be controlled and told what to do and not have to think -- and never die, of course. It's sick is what it is. I don't want to be a forever-young living corpse.
Dean Koontz
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.
Dean Koontz
He would never need a knife to spread a pat of butter on his toast. That smile would quickly melt it.
Dean Koontz
Ambition and stupidity are a dangerous combination.
Dean Koontz
Talking about a problem sometimes makes it worse.
Dean Koontz
It's funny, ma'am, how sometimes you're so sarcastic but it doesn't sting.""Because of my dimples. Dimples are a get-out-of-jail-free card
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
Don't you love your mother, dear?""I guess so. A hard, sharp, thorny kind of love that might be pity more than anything else.
Dean Koontz
My life has a mysterious purpose that I don't understand, and day by day, conflict by conflict, I learn by going where I have to go.
Dean Koontz
Chronologically she is twelve but emotionally she is older, and intellectually older still.
Dean Koontz
To spare Cloyce's victims further indignities to their memory, I must be a scourge. To prevent others from perhaps being infected by Cloyce's depravity by watching him at work, I must be a scourge. To prevent time management technology from falling into the hands of authorities who, if not already corrupt, would be corrupted by it, I must be a scourge.Scourges aren't heroes.I had never imagined myself to be a hero, but never had I imagined I would be this.Scourges transgress against social and sacred order.A scourge went into darker territory than that. A scourge was not compelled to kill by mental imbalance or emotional confusion or selfish desire. A scourge made a carefully reasoned decision to kill in numbers that exceeded what was absolutely necessary to ensure self-preservation and the defense of the innocent. Even if he killed for the right reason, he was in rebellion against social order and commanding authority.Who scourges will be scourged. In fulfilling this dark role in Roseland, I would bring about my own death.Yet I knew I would not retreat from my decision.
Dean Koontz
From all these friends, I could not escape learning some of the statistics that I preferred not to know. Forty-one people at the mall had been wounded. Nineteen had died. Everyone said it was a miracle that only nineteen perished. What has gone wrong with our world when nineteen dead can seem like any kind of miracle?
Dean Koontz
If she fully embraced life with all its conflicts, she would suffer a breakdown.
Dean Koontz
I had not asked to be born. Only to be loved.
Dean Koontz
People scare me more than anything, for I know too well the savagery of which humankind is capable.
Dean Koontz
Petting, scratching, and cuddling a dog could be as soothing to the mind and heart as deep meditation and almost as good for the soul as prayer.
Dean Koontz
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.
Dean Koontz
Nothing is worse than being alone on the evening of the day when one's cow has exploded.
Dean Koontz
We were fortunate his brief psychic vision distracted him from what his fingertips could have told him about my face.Of course we were aware that temporary clairvoyance was a lame and unlikely explanation. The ordering of this world, however is so abstruce, so deep and complex, most explanations that people to make sense of moments of strange experience are inadequate. Our very existence as thinking creatures is an astonishment that cant be solved. Every human cell, with its thousands of protein chains, is more complex than a 747 or the largest cruise ship, in fact more complex than the two combined. All life on earth, in its extravagant variety, offers itself for study, but though we probe to ever deeper layers of its structure, the meaning eludes us.There is no end of wonders and mysteries: fireflies and music boxes, the stars that outnumber all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the world.
Dean Koontz
In the war, to survive, you had to be responsible every minute of every day, unhesitatingly responsible for yourself, for your every action. You had to be responsible for your buddies, too, because survival wasn't something that could be achieved alone. That's maybe the one positive thing about fighting in a war - it clarifies your thinking and makes you realize that a sense of responsibility is what separates good men from the damned.
Dean Koontz
Duty is a good thing, a calling without which no civilization can survive, but it is also a weight and chain that sometimes seems sure to sink you to the airless bottom of a dark pool
Dean Koontz
Do as little harm to others as you can; make any sacrifice for your true friends; be responsible for yourself and ask nothing of others; and grab all the fun you can. Don't give much thought to yesterday, don't worry about tomorrow, live in the moment, and trust that your existence has meaning even when the world seems to be all blind chance and chaos. When life lands a hammer blow in your face, do your best to respond to the hammer as if it had been a cream pie.
Dean Koontz
The sky is deep, the sky is dark. The light of the stars is o damn stark/When I look up, I fill with fear, if all we have is what lies here, this lonely world, this troubled place, then cold dead stars and empty space...Well, I see no reason to persevere, no reason to laugh or shed a tear, no reason to sleep and none to wake/ No promises to keep and none to make. And so at night I still raise my eyes tos tudy the clear but mysterious skies that arch avove us, cold as stone. Are you there God? Are we alone?
Dean Koontz
I assure you the law isn't a line engraved in marble, immovable and unchangeable through the centuries. Rather...the law is like a string, fixed at both ends but with a great deal of play in it-very loose, the line of the law-so you can stretch it this way or that, rearrange the arc of it so you are always-short of the blantant theft or cold-blooded murder-safely on the right side.
Dean Koontz
Sometimes enlightenment descends upon you when you least expect it...
Dean Koontz
Sleep is a kind of peace, and I have not yet earned peace.
Dean Koontz
I am amazed that there are still nights when I sleep well.
Dean Koontz
Now, sprawled comfortably in his motel bed, Anson Sharp enjoyed the sleep of the amoral, which is far deeper and more restful than the sleep of the just, the righteous, and the innocent.
Dean Koontz
When I woke up and the dark wasn't gone yet, and the dark seemed so big, then she sang soft and made the dark small again."That is the best of all things we can do for one another: Make the dark small.
Dean Koontz
Holy men tell us life is a mystery.They embrace that concept happily.But some mysteries bite and barkand come to get you in the dark.
Dean Koontz
The human imagination may be the most elastic thing in the universe, stretching to encompass the millions of dreams that in centuries of relectless struggle built modern civilization, to entertain the endless doubts that hamper every human enterprise, and to conceive the vast menagerie of boogeymen that trouble every human heart.
Dean Koontz
Although enlightened people know that an extreme phobia wasn't a form of madness, hey could not help but regard it as odd.
Dean Koontz
Perseverance is impossible if we don't permit ourselves to hope.
Dean Koontz
Three more words. Be happy. Persevere.
Dean Koontz
Life, Stormy says, is not about how fast you run or even with what degree of grace. It's about perseverance, about staying on your feet and slogging forward no matter what.
Dean Koontz
From their perspective, however, torture might make a sort of cockeyed sense if it was ritualistic, part of a ceremony that this fraternity of the demented required of themselves when they murdered one of their own.
Dean Koontz
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.
Dean Koontz
But with one exception, all things pass from this world and time erases not just memories but entire civilizations, reducing everyone and every monument to dust. The only that survives is love, for it is an energy as enduring as light, which travels outward from its source toward the ever-expanding boundaries of the universe, the very energy of which all things were conceived and with which all things will be sustained in a world beyond this world of time and dust and forgetting".
Dean Koontz
Chronologically she is twelve, but emotionally she is older, and intellectually older still.
Dean Koontz
Eventually he understood that he was crying for himself. He was ashamed of the man whom he had become, mourning the man whom he had expected to be when he'd been a boy.
Dean Koontz
So," said the Russian, after regaining is composure, "the lesson of the model is that the universe——all its matter and forms of energy——arise out of thought.
Dean Koontz
More likely, they would just cease to exist.""That's death.""No, it's different. Death leaves a corps.
Dean Koontz
...on a subconscious level we're aware that time isn't enduring, that it is not a required condition of our existence, that there comes a point when we will have no need of it.
Dean Koontz
I survive by finding the sweet spot between reason and unreason, between the rational and irrational.
Dean Koontz
Unreason is an essential medicine as long as you do not overdose.
Dean Koontz
As a writer, Bibi, you could be a doctor of the soul.
Dean Koontz
I've been badly scared myself, badly, for quite a few years now. You learn to live with it.
Dean Koontz
To get through life successfully, body and soul must translate each other correctly more often than not.
Dean Koontz
All she wanted was love with respect, respect was so important to her, and I could give her that.
Dean Koontz