Dean Koontz Quotes

The world howls for social justice, but when it comes to social responsibility, you sometimes cant even hear crickets chirping.

Your mind always does worse things than people can show in a movie.

The functions of intellect are insufficient without courage, love, friendship, compassion and empathy.

It is human nature to want to believe in the wizardry of the magician--but also to turn against him and to scorn him the moment that he commits the slightest error that reveals his trickery. Those in the audience are embarrassed to have been so easily astonished, and they blame the performer for their gullibility.

She says what holds their marriage together is that she feels too damn sorry for him to ask for a divorce.

I have more self-doubt than any writer I've ever known.... The positive aspect of self-doubt - if you can channel it into useful activity instead of being paralyzed by it - is that by the time you reach the end of a novel, you know precisely why you made every decision in the narrative, the multiple purposes of every metaphor and image.

Human beings can always be relied upon to exert, with vigor, their God-given right to be stupid.

I don't find slashing and blood flying everywhere to be scary. I just find it repulsive.

Like all of us in this storm between birth and death, I can wreak no great changes on the world, only small changes for the better, I hope, in the lives of those I love.

Maybe I'm needy, neurotic, paranoid. Under the circumstances, of course, if I weren't needy, neurotic, and paranoid, I'd obviously be psychotic.

I am my own worst enemy. This, more than any other trait, proves my fundamental humanity.

If you have to pay the bills, and you write something you're not proud of, use a pen-name for that.

When we hope, we usually hope for the wrong thing.

Pain is a gift. Humanity, without pain, would know neither fear nor pity.

Evil is no faceless stranger, living in a distant neighborhood. Evil has a wholesome, hometown face, with merry eyes and an open smile. Evil walks among us, wearing a mask which looks like all our faces.

Night has patterns that can be read less by the living than by the dead.

The world is full of broken people. Splints, casts, miracle drugs, and time can't mend fractured hearts, wounded hearts, wounded minds, torn spirits.

In this uncertain space between birth and death, especially here at the end of the world in Moonlight Bay, we need hope as surely as we need food and water, love and friendship. The trick, however, is to remember that hope is a perilous thing, that it's not a steel and concrete bridge across the void between this moment and a brighter future. Hope is no stronger than tremulous beads of dew strung on a filament of spider web, and it alone can't long support the terrible weight of an anguished mind and a tortured heart.

The human species was too fond of lying, cheating, envy, ignorance, self-pity, self-righteousness, and utopian visions that always led to mass murder-but until and if it destroyed itself, it harbored the potential to become nobler, to take responsibility for its actions, to live and let live, and to earn the stewardship of the earth.

In my books, I never portray violence as a reasonable solution to a problem. If the lead characters in the story are driven to it, it's at the extreme end of their experience.

Too many dogs continue to be abused and abandond - one is too many - and people continue to kill people for money and envy and no reason at all. Bad people succeed and good people fail, but that's not the end of the story. Miracles happen that nobody sees, and among us walk heroes who are never recognised, and people live in loneliness because they cannot believe they are loved

Odd: I wish I could believe in reincarnation. Chief Porter: Not me. Once down the track is enough of a test. Pass me or fail me, Dear Lord, but don't make me go through high school again. Odd: If there's something we want so bad in this life but we can't have it, maybe we could get it the next time around. Chief Porter: Or maybe not getting it, accepting less without bitterness and being grateful for what we have is a part of what we're here to learn.

Another way to be awakened by the beauty and complexity of the word is to get a dog. Small Things like a plant that I had passed a thousand time and never given a second thought to. But the dog is curious. And the dog stops and wants to smell this and smell that. And the dog makes you look and focus and take the time.

While I like people, I do also like being alone in a room and seeing what you can do with a particular theme or subject.

That was one of the most fundamental and sacred duties good friends and families performed for one another! They tended the flame of memory, so no one’s death meant an immediate vanishment from the world; in some sense the deceased would live on after their passing, at least as long as those who loved them lived. Such memories were an essential weapon against the chaos of life and death, a way to ensure some continuity from generation to generation, an order of endorsement and meaning.

It is music that speaks to the deepest reaches of your soul, and you are lifted higher, ever higher, by the adagio, in my opinion more so even than in any of the masses that Beethoven composed.

If we were always conscious of the fact that people precious to us are frighteningly mortal, hanging not even by a thread, but by a wisp of gossamer, perhaps we would be kinder to them and more grateful for the love and friendship they give to us.

Maybe when all was said and done, the imagination was the most powerful of all weapons. It was the imagination of the human race that had allowed it to dream of a life beyond cold caves and of a possible future in the stars.

In a crunch a man's reputation never counts for as much as it ought to.

Intuition is seeing with the soul.

No one can grant you happiness. Happiness is a choice we all have the power to make.

Although she had resisted this knowledge all her life, had lived determinedly in the future focused there by ambition, she understood at last that this was the real condition of humanity: The dance of life occurred not yesterday or tomorrow, but only here at the still point that was the present. This truth is simmple, sel-evident, but difficult to accept, for we sentimentalize the past and wallow in it, while we endure the moment and in every waking hour dream of the future.

In a world that daily disconnects further from truth, more and more people accept the virtual in place of the real, and all things virtual are also malleable.

The sane understand that human beings are incapable of sustaining conspiracies on a grand scale, because some of our most defining qualities as a species are inattention to detail, a tendency to panic, and an inability to keep our mouths shut.

I would not cry. I do not cry. How bitter do you risk becoming by swallowing too many tears?

I'm either a mutant or a cripple, and I refuse to be a cripple. People pity cripples, but they're afraid of mutants [...] Fear implies respect.

There's lots of law these days, but not much justice.

It was one of those rare times when remembering the dead was more inmportant than tending to the needs of the living.

In the real world as in dreams nothing is quite what it seems. -The Book of Counted Sorrows

Southerners have many fine qualities, charm and civility among them, and a sense of the tragic.

The biggest advice is being true to what you want to do. Don't worry if other people understand it or don't understand it. If what you're doing has merit, it will find its way.

Your sense of responsibility to others can never be excessive.

I know it's hard being a single mother baby, he said, but we're talking fundamentals here. Homemade cookies are one of the best parts of christmas. It's an absolute fundamental.

There's lots of law these days, but not much justice. Celebrities murder their wives and go free. A mother kills her children, and the news people on TV say she's the victim and want you to send money to her lawyers. When everything's upside down like this, what fool just sits back and thinks justice will prevail?

I've had good publishers and bad publishers, and you've got to learn when the advice is sensible and when it's not.

Are you prepared for the first wound?

Reality isn't what it used to be.

We may lack riches, but the greatest fortune is what lies in our hearts.