Dean Koontz

“I stopped keeping an eye out for Santa Claus on Christmas Eve because, when I was five, my mother told me that Santa was a wicked pervert who would cut off my peepee with a pair of scissors...if I didn't stop chattering about him, he would be certain to put me on his list and look me up.Christmas was never the same after that, but at least I still have my peepee.”

“How passionately we love everything that cannot last...”

“But of course we don't notice the descent until we're rocketing along at high velocity.”

“These days law thinks it's about nothin' but laws. Law don't remember it was once handed down from somewhere, that it once meant not just no, but was a way to live and a reason to live that way. Law now thinks nobody but politicians made it or remake it, so maybe it ain't a surprise some people don't care anymore about law, and even some lawmen don't understand the real reason for law.”

“Live you can evade; death you cannot.”

“We not-much-of-anything types don't worry about the cost of leaving a light on unnecessarily.”

“Wealth is power, and power is the only thing about which contemporary culture cares.”

“The world needed a little Evil, so Good had something to compare itself to, but you couldn't let it think it had the right-of-way on the road and an invitation to dinner.”

“Sometimes there is no darker place than our own thoughts; the moonless midnight of the mind.”

“Get out of here while you can. She's crazier than a syphilitic suicide bomber with mad-cow disease.”

“In the belly of Leviathan, Mr Thomas, one can either despair and perish, or be cheerful and persevere.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“I warned myself against the danger of compassion in this case. How easy it would be to imagine the traumas of childhood that might have deformed her into the moral monster she had become, and then to convince myself that those traumas could be balanced - and their effects reversed - by sufficient acts of kindness.”

“Besides, I can't get to where I want to go by conscious or unconscious suicide. I've got my strange little life to lead. Leading it the best I can - that's how I buy the ticket to where I want to be.”

“This time I would choose to err on the side of illogic. I had to trust intuition, and plunge as I had never plunged before, with blind faith.”

“I survive by finding the sweet spot between reason and unreason, between the rational and irrational.”

“It seems reckless, even perverse, to spend so much time and effort nurturing such a deadly thing...Ernie and Pooka seek to understand death and to master their fear of it by domesticating it in the form of the brugmansia.”

“You've always mistaken my absolute self-assurance for profound thought.”

“As for self-deceit, most people find it as essential for survival as air. You rarely indulge in it.”

“I was looking forward to having a halo. It would make such a convenient reading lamp.”

“You're a poster boy for sincerity. You have all the guile of a lamb.”

“We've only been sitting here forty minutes. I'm never at the morning table less than an hour and a half. I do some of my finest plotting over breakfast coffee and raisin brioche.”

“I do not permit blasphemy, the F-word, or obscenities such as soy milk at my table. Consider yourself chastised.”

“If you're still, and if you don't hope too much, peace will come to you. It's a grace. But you have to choose happiness.”

“Unreason is an essential medicine as long as you do not overdose.”

“Too many of us die without knowing transcendent joy, in part because we pursue one form or another of materialism. We seek meaning in possessions, in pursuit of cosmic justice for earthly grievances, in the acquisition of power over others. But one day Death reveals that life is wasted in these cold passions, because zealotry of any kind precludes love except of the thing that is idolized.”

“When Victoria told me how intensely she hated me, I kept the Beretta aimed at her face, but heard myself say, "I don't hate you."She called me an effing liar and said, "Hate makes the world go around. Envy, lust and hate.""I stopped hating anyone the day when I realized hating can't restore to me anything that's lost.”

“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.”

“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.”

“She can put her life in Mitch's strong hands and fall at once into a dreamless sleep. In a sense, that is what marriage is about-a good marriage-a total trusting with your heart, your mind, your life.”

“He had taught me how to be a man when my real father proved not to be much of one himself and incapable of showing a son the way.”

“If we aren't here for one another, why are we here?" - Grady Adams”

“People think power makes them big, but it brings out their inner bratty child and makes them small." - Grady Adams - "Breathless by Dean Koontz pg 287 chapter 59”

“His glare could melt a polar bear's testicles.”

“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.”

“Annamaria had me verzekerd dat ik in werkelijkheid maar één keer zou sterven, en dat die dood er op geen enkele manier toe zou doen. Iedereen kent echter dagen waarin we een beetje doodgaan, wanneer we verdriet of een nederlaag te verwerken hebben, of bang zijn, of anderen zien lijden die we enkel medelijden kunnen bieden, geen hulp, mensen die buiten de grenzen van onze genade vallen.”

“We are all the walking wounded in a world that is a war zone. Everything we love will be taken from us, everything, last of all life itself. Yet everywhere I look, I find great beauty in this battlefield, and grace and the promise of joy.”

“Some people misunderstand evil and believe it will relent, and because their misplaced hope inspires dark hearts to dream darker dreams, they are the fathers and mothers of all wars. Evil does not relent; it must be defeated. And even when defeated, uprooted, and purified by fire, evil leaves behind a seed that will one day germinate and, in blooming, again be misunderstood.”

“If wishes were filet mignon, we'd always eat well at dinner”

“Waiting is one of the things that human beings cannot do well, though it is one of the essential things we must do successfully if we are to know happiness.”

“It isn't possible to smile too much, odd one.""Did you ever see the Joker in Batman?”

“The why of the mind's existence and the how of its profound capacity to reason - especially its penchant for moral reasoning - will by their very nature remain as mysterious as whatever lies outside of time.”

“The only way back from such a bleak despondency is to shape humiliation into humility, to strive always to triumph over the darkness while never forgetting that the honor and the beauty are more in the striving than in the winning. When triumph at last comes, our efforts alone could not have won the day without that grace which surpasses all understanding and which will, if we allow it, imbue our lives with meaning.”

“Maybe if everything was beautiful, nothing would be.People saw one thing, they swooned over it. They saw this other thing, they pounded it with sticks.Maybe there had to be variety for life to work. Swoon over everything, you get bored. Beat everything with a stick-boring.”

“Imminent death didn't terrify her as much as did the prospect of having lived a life in perpetual retreat, a life that would amount now to so much less than she'd ever hoped,...”

“If there's nothing to learn because we know it all, what's the challenge? Why would the effort matter? What would be the point? - Odd Thomas”

“Without faith to act as a governor, the human mind is a runaway worry generator, a dynamo of negative expectations. And because your life is yours to shape as you wish with free will, if you entertain too much anxiety about too many things, if you place no trust in providence, what you fear will more often come to pass. We make so many of our own troubles, from mere mishaps to disasters, by dwelling on the possibility of them until the possible becomes inevitable.”

“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.”