Perhaps extreme danger strips us of all pretenses, all ambitions, all confusions, focusing us more intensely than we are otherwise ever focused, so that we remember what we otherwise spend most of our lives forgetting: that 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 of us as are the present and the past.
Dean KoontzThe recognition of pain and fear in others give rise in us to pity, and in our pity is our humanity, our redemption.
Dean KoontzWhat most people find important, you do not. This is Wisdom. To what you believe is important, you are ready to give your mind, heart, and soul. This is Grace.
Dean KoontzHoly men tell us life is a mystery. They embrace that concept happily. But some mysteries bite and bark and come to get you in the dark.
Dean KoontzNothing is worse than being alone on the evening of the day when one's cow has exploded.
Dean KoontzEvery world has dogs or their equivalent, creatures that thrive on companionship, creatures that are of a high order of intelligence although not the highest and that therefore is simple enough in their wants and needs to remain innocent. The combination of their innocence and their intelligence allows them to serve as a bridge bewtween what is transient and what is eternal, between the finate and the infinate.
Dean KoontzEach book is a mind alive, a life revealed, a world awaiting exploration, but living people are all those things, as well—and more, because their stories haven’t yet been completely told.
Dean KoontzPeople 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 KoontzExperts must read the patterns and judge their usefulness as evidence. Under any of numerous pressures, an expert may wish to misread a pattern or even to alter it. Americans had a touching trust in "experts".
Dean KoontzEvery talent is unearned, however, and with it comes a solemn obligation to use it as fully and as wisely as possible.
Dean KoontzI receive about 10,000 letters a year from readers, and in the first year after a book is published, perhaps 5,000 letters will deal specifically with that piece of work.
Dean KoontzMost universities are no longer temples of knowledge, but of power, and true moderns worship there.
Dean KoontzNone 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 KoontzAlways, the eye sees more than the mind can comprehend, and we go through life self-blinded to much that lies before us. We want a simple world, but we live in a magnificently complex one, and rather than open ourselves to it, we perceive the world through filters that make it less daunting.
Dean KoontzThere's still a fascination with somebody who can write at book length, no matter what the book is.
Dean KoontzTo many people, free will is a license to rebel not against what is unjust or hard in life but against what is best for them and true.
Dean KoontzSometimes it seemed that the human heart, this side of Eden, feared life more than death, light more than darkness, freedom more than surrender.
Dean KoontzI can't go on to page two until I can get page one as perfect as I can make it. That might mean I will rewrite and rewrite page one 20, 30, 50, 100 times.
Dean KoontzWhen life hands us a beutiful bouquet of flowers we stare at it in cautious expectation of a bee.
Dean KoontzWhat year these events transpired is of no consequence. Where they occured is not important. The time is always, and the place is everywhere.
Dean KoontzWe are coming out of a century that was taught that one way of looking at the world, that one form of behavior, is as valid as another. The idea of true evil has been blown away.
Dean KoontzNever 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.
Dean KoontzI always thought happiness was a choice and I always chose things that made me happy, and books were one of those.
Dean KoontzSometimes there is no darker place than our thoughts, the moonless midnight of the mind.
Dean KoontzThanks to the circus between my ears, I can seize upon the smallest disquieting observation and from it extrapolate a terror of cataclysmic proportions.
Dean KoontzMaybe the devil in human beings isn't the reflection of the devil, perhaps the devil is only a reflection of the savagery and brutality of our kind. Maybe what we've done is create the devil in our own image
Dean Koontz...he was part of a family whether he wanted to be or not, the family of humanity, more often than not a frustrating and contentious clan, flawed and often deeply confused, but also periodically noble and admirable, with a common destiny that every member shared.
Dean KoontzWhat will happen will happen. There is time for miracles until there is no more time, but time has no end.
Dean KoontzThere's never any humongous next draft. I know a writer who every time he finished a novel - you would know his name very well - but his editor would come and live with him for a month. And they would go through the manuscript together.
Dean KoontzShakespeare again. Once you let him into your head, he takes up tenancy and will not leave.
Dean KoontzI think it's the people who have no doubt that every word they put down is gold that probably don't write very well.
Dean KoontzMore to the point, I know why soldiers, home from war, seldom tell their families about their exploits in more than general terms. We who survive must go on in the names of those who fall, but if we dwell too much on the vivid details of what we've witnessed of man's inhumanity to man, we simply can't go on. perseverance is impossible if we don't permit ourselves to hope.
Dean KoontzThe rain wasn't the usual glittering silver, but dark and dirty, as if nature were a scrubwoman wringing out a filthy mop.
Dean KoontzDo 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 KoontzI 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.
Dean KoontzHe said, if you allow yourself to be enchanted by the beauty to be seen in even ordinary things, then all things proved to be extraordinary.
Dean Koontz