Dean Koontz

“What we do as a society is seek simple answers.”

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

“We are buried when we're born. The world is a place of graves occupied and graves potential. Life is what happens while we wait for our appointment with the mortician.”

“Destiny struggles to reassert the pattern that was meant to be.”

“We yearn for tomorrow and the progress it represents. But yesterday was once tomorrow, and where was the progress in it?”

“Imagination was so powerful that you had to be careful because you could imagine things into existence that you might regret.”

“You know who used to scare me when I was a little kid? Snuggle the Bear.""Do I know Snuggle?""In those TV ads for that fabric softener. Somebody would say how soft their robe was or their towels, and Snuggle the teddy bear would be hiding behind a pillow or creeping around under a chair, giggling.""He was just happy that people were pleased.""No, it was maniacal little giggle. And his eyes were glazed. And how did he get in all those houses to hide and giggle?""You're saying Snuggle should've been charged with B and E?""Absolutely. Most of the time when he giggled, he covered his mouth with one paw. I always thought he didn't want you to see his teeth.""Snuggle had bad teeth?" she asked."I figured they were rows of tiny vicious fangs he was hiding. When I was maybe four or five, I used to have nightmares where I'd be in bed with a teddy bear, and it was Snuggle, and he was trying to chew open my jugular and suck the lifeblood out of me."She said, "So much about you suddenly makes more sense than it ever did before.""Maybe if we aren't cops someday, we can open a toy shop.""Can we run a toy shop and have guns?""I don't see why not," he said.”

“There's more to me than you see, another me down inside somewhere, full of hate, ready to hurt, cut, smash, or if maybe there's no Other and there's just me alone, then I'm not the person I thought I was, I'm something twisted and terrible, terrible.”

“Life is a train ride, and at the many stations along the route, people important to us debark, never to get aboard again, until by the end of the journey, we sit in a passenger car where most of the seats are empty.”

“When a liar became too skilled at deception, he could lose the ability to discern the truth, and could himself be more easily deceived.”

“There's no tragedy in nature, only process -- and therefore no triumph, either.”

“When Mary Shelley took a local legend based on truth and crafted fiction from it, she'd made Victor a tragic figure and killed him off. He understood her dramatic purpose for giving him a death scene, but he loathed her for portraying him as tragic and a failure.Her judgement of his work was arrogant. What else of consequence did she ever write? And of the two, who was dead - and who was not?”

“All this is just a place, she said. And sometimes such a lonely one.”

“When she had delight in her heart, her face transcended all her suffering, whereupon the scars and the deformed features and the mottled skin became the remarkable face of a hero and the cherished face of a friend.”

“If you can spend enough time playing other people, you don't have to think too much about your own character motivations.”

“Half a century goes by in what seems like a year. Don't waste an hour in boredom, son, or wishing for tomorrow.”

“If allowed to be, the heart is self-policing, and a reasonable measure of guilt guards against corruption.”

“To do...what you feel sure is right and in the aid of justice, you sometimes have to do things that...make you wonder if in fact you are the good man that you like to believe you are.”

“It is also essential that good men and women not be educated and propagandized into believing that real evil is a myth and that all malevolent behavior is merely the result of a broken family's or a failed society's shortcomings, amenable to cure by counseling and by the application of new economic theory.”

“If evil geniuses are so rare, why do so many bad people get away with so many crimes against their fellow citizens, and, when they become leaders of nations, against humanity?”

“All I asked was that I be spared surprises, although, in this world of six billion souls, all acting with free will and too many with audacity, surprises are inevitable, too few of them are the kind that make you smile and that lift your heart.”

“...wonder admits to the existence of mystery...recognition of mystery allows the possibility of Truth.”

“I am no good alone. I need bonds, vows real if unspoken, shared laughter, and people who depend on me as I depend on them.”

“A species that can blind itself to truth, that can plunge so enthusiastically along roads that lead nowhere but to tragedy, is sometimes amusing in its recklessness...”

“Maybe they traveled into darkness eternal without protest because they lacked the imagination to envision anything else.”

“If my gift has a giver other than indifferent Nature and comes with a purpose, then the angel in charge of the Odd Thomas account must be operating on a shoestring budget.”

“Nobody's inherently bad, said Annamaria. It's all about the choices we make.And the Deceiver, said Blossom, is always there to whisper the wrong choice in your ear. But I believe remorse can lead to redemption.”

“The World itself is a wonderland, young man, as you well know.”

“Over dinner, I had agreed to be her paladin, and no self-respecting paladin would decide on a course of action based on a majority vote of a committee of two.”

“No one can genuinely love the world, which is too large to love entire. To love all the world at once is...dangerous self-delusion. Loving the world is like loving the idea of love, which is perilous because, feeling virtuous about this grand affection, you are freed from the struggles and the duties that come with loving people as individuals, with loving one place-home-above all others.I embrace the world on a scale that allows genuine love-the small places like a town, a neighborhood, a street-and I love life, because of what the beauty of this world and of this life portend.”

“He had no credit cards. This made him suspicious in a country that not only looked to the future but lived on the earnings from it.”

“I avoid contemporary TV...politics...art: all too frantic, fevered, and frivolous, or else angry, bitter.”

“Dogs know we need to give affection as much as they need to receive it. They were the first therapists; they've been in practice for thousands of years.”

“Shakespeare again. Once you let him into your head, he takes up tenancy and will not leave.”

“As a teenager, I always intended to do my homework. But when the supplicant dead come to you for justice and you also have occasional prophetic dreams, life tends to interfere with your studies.”

“We spend nine months in a nurturing darkness before we're born, and we aspire to the highest of all places when we die.”

“Malevolence and paranoia cohabit in a twisted mind. Bad men trust no one because they know the treachery of which they themselves are capable.Bad men...destroy one another, although...they prefer those who are innocent and as pure as this world allows them to be. They feed on violence, but they feast on the despoiling of what is good.”

“I possess everyone who sleeps in the motor court, roam their memories, and embed recurrent nightmares that will destroy their sleep for weeks after I’ve departed them.”“I’d prefer a free continental breakfast.”

“With his eyes squinted to slits, Donny reminds me of Clint Eastwood, if Clint Eastwood were eight inches shorter, thirty pounds heavier, less good-looking, with male-pattern baldness, and badly scarred.”

“There's no use wasting are energy being afraid of the devils, demons and things that go bump in the night... Because ultimately we'll never encounter anything more terrifying than the monster among us. Hell is where we make it.”

“Maybe 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”

“Dare we linger, dare we skate?Dare we laugh or celebrate,knowing we may strain the ice?Preserve the ice at any price?”

“Death was driving an emerald-green Lexus.”

“That's all that matters, really: that we can make each other feel better.”

“The best part of a Mr. Goodbar is not the wrapper, is it? No, and the best part of a Coke is not the can. On those nights when you lie awake, either man or boy, wondering about yourself, peeling away one layer of oddness after another, you should remember and always be grateful that the woefully imperfect person that you are, with all your contradictions and unworthy desires, is not the best of you, any more than the wrapper is the best part of a Mr. Goodbar. -Odd Thomas - Odd Apocalypse by Dean Koonts pgs. 354-355 chapter 53”

“How have you kept yourself as yourself all these years? 'Books,' the boy said. 'Thousands of books.' 'They must have been the right books.' 'Some were, some weren't. You figure out which are which.' 'How do you figure it out?' 'At first by how you feel.' 'And later?' 'By reading what's there on the page and also what's not.' 'Between the lines,' she said. 'Under the lines,' he said. -Annamaria and Timothy -Odd Apocalypse by Dean Koontz pg 328 chapter 49”

“Annamaria had preferred oil rather than electric lamps. She said that sunshine grows plants, the plants express essential oils, and years later those oils fire the lamps - giving back 'the light of the other days'.”

“Nothing can be imagined, nothing can be visualized in our minds, until we have a word for it. Therefore, when I give myself to the free flow of any words that trip off my tongue without predetermination, I am tapping into the primal creative power at the heart of the cosmos. Or maybe I'm just a bullshit artist.”

“I would die of lonely.”

“I didn't have a cell phone because I never needed to play video games or surf the Net, or exchange nude photos with a congressman. - Odd Thomas - Odd Apocalypse by Dean Koontz pg 137 chapter 19”