Dean Koontz

“Death came, Death went, but Commerce flowed Eternal.”

“its a rare thing to know one completly to the core and stil love him”

“reality is perception perception change....reality is fluid so if by reality you mean reliably tangible objects and immutable events then theres no such thing”

“Paper clip. Ping. Disaster. Colonel Bowie is down. Colonel Bowie is down! The Mexican Army is now leaderless. Capone gloats.”

“Martie came out of the office first, smiling prettily, and Dusty rose to greet her, smiling less prettily, and Dr. Ahriman entered the waiting room behind her, smiling paternally, and maybe Dusty smiled a little more prettily when he saw the psychiatrist, because the man virtually radiated competence and compassion and confidence and all sorts of good stuff. ”

“Grapes are juicy. Strawberries. Oranges. Good pork chops are succulent," said Dusty. "But the word isn't accurately descriptive of a person."Smiling with delight, Ahriman said, "Oh, really, not accurately descriptive? Be careful housepainter. Your genes are showing. What if I were a cannibal?”

“That is, Jack thought, the way of life. The horror changes us, because we can never forget. Cursed with memory. It starts when we're old enough to know what death is and realize that sooner or later we'll lose everyone we love. We're never the same. But somehow we're all right. We go on.”

“Hell of a thing to have to experience, hell of a thing to have to see, to be reminded you're a human being and all it meant to be one.”

“Home was not a perfect place. But it was the only home they had and they could hope to make it better.”

“...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.”

“If one's friends do not openly laugh at him, they are not in fact his friends. ”

“I need those nukes, the chief said. I need them, I need them right now.I don't want to be an enabler, sir. I'd rather get you into a twelve step program to help you break this addiction.”

“Loss is the hardest thing, I said. But it's also the teacher that's the most difficult to ignore.”

“Evil men often easy to mislead, because they have spent so long deceiving that they no longer recognise the truth and mistake deseption for it.”

“Life had not taught me to distrust ministers, but it had taught me to trust no one more than dogs.”

“It's only life. We all get through it. Not all of us complete the journey in the same condition. Along the way, some lose their legs or eyes in acidents or altercations, while others skate through the years with nothing worse to worry about than an occassional bad-hair day.I still possessed both legs and both eyes, and even my hair looked all right when I rose that Wednesday morning in late January. If I returned to bed sixteen hours later, having lost all my hair but nothing else, I would consider the day a triumph. Even minus a few teeth, I'd call it a triumph.”

“Every human being has appetites difficult to control but far fewer have humility, gentleness, and an awareness of their weaknesses.”

“If anyone in your publishing life were to argue against a particular book or a career aspiration for reasons you had not already pondered and rejected after careful analysis, if they dazzled you with brilliant new considerations, then you’d have to back off and revisit your decisions. But what I was told never dazzled me. For example, I was often advised, by different people, that my work would never gain a big audience because my vocabulary was too large.”

“A body of work, therefore, reveals the intellectual and emotional progress of the writer, and is a map of his soul. It's both terrifying and liberating to consider this aspect of being a novelist.”

“Whiskers of the cat,Webbed toes on my swimming dog;God is in the details.”

“Not all popular novelists are good, but all good novelists are, sooner or later, popular.”

“Living in the modern age,death for virtue is the wage.So it seems in darker hours.Evil wins, kindness cowers.Ruled by violence and vicewe all stand upon thin ice.Are we brave or are we mice,here upon such thin, thin ice?Dare we linger, dare we skate?Dare we laugh or celebrate,knowing we may strain the ice?Preserve the ice at any price?”

“If you write with passion in your own style, you will make a place for yourself”

“For a better part of a decade, he had been outside society, distanced in mind and spirit if not in body. But now, for the first time since Centeral America, Jack Twist had the need, the desire, and ability to reach out to society around him, to make friends.”

“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.”

“Guilt is a tireless horse. Grief ages into sorrow, and sorrow is an enduring rider.”

“The geometry of judgment is a circle. Hate is a snake that turns to consume itself from the tail, a circle that diminishes to a point, then to nothing. Pride is such a snake, and envy, and greed. Love, however, is a hoop, a wheel, that rolls on forever. We are rescued by those whom we have rescued. The saved become the saviors of their saviors.”

“To 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.”

“At the core of every ordered system, whether a family or a factory, is chaos. But in the whirl of every chaos lies a strange order, waiting to be found.”

“Always, 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.”

“In each little life, we can see great truth and beauty, and in each little life we glimpse the way of all things in the universe. If we alow ourselves to be enchanted by the beauty of the ordinary, we begin to see that all things extraordinary. ”

“The hard rain nailed the night to the city.”

“Appearances are not reality; but they often can be a convincing alternative to it. You can control appearances most of the time, but facts are what they are. When the facts are too sharp, you can craft a cheerful version of the situation and cover the facts the way that you can covered a battered old four-slice toaster with a knitted cozy featuring images of kittens.”

“Given enough time, you could convince yourself that loneliness was something better, that it was solitude, the ideal condition for reflection, even a kind of freedom.Once you were thus convinced, you were foolish to open the door and let anyone in, not all the way in. You risked the hard-won equilibrium, that tranquility that you called peace”

“Then what are you? An electronic Hannibal Lector? You can't eat my liver with fava beans through a modem, you know.”

“People 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Fate isn’t one straight road…there are forks in it, many different routes to different ends. We have the free will to choose the path.”

“He 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.”

“Because God is never cruel, there is a reason for all things. We must know the pain of loss; because if we never knew it, we would have no compassion for others, and we would become monsters of self-regard, creatures of unalloyed self-interest. The terrible pain of loss teaches humility to our prideful kind, has the power to soften uncaring hearts, to make a better person of a good one.”

“As long as I have laughter, I am not without hope”

“The desire to write well can never be fulfilled without hard work.”

“Out of sight above the house, the mirror moon reflected the sun of a day not yet dawned, shining the pale light of tomorrow on the yard and on the paper birches.”

“If this was the best wine that Jim and Nora could afford or, worse, if this was their idea of a good wine - well, sadly, then they were better off dead.”

“In this age, lies were the universal lubricant of the culture. A love of Truth and commitment to it were seldom rewarded and were often punished.”

“Each man or woman was a mansion in a condition between grandness and disrepair, and even in a grand palace, sometimes a room existed in which no one but the resident would ever be welcome.”

“Please, don't torture me with cliches. If you're going to try to intimidate me, have the courtesy to go away for a while, acquire a better education, improve your vocabulary, and come back with some fresh metaphors.”

“Rub-a-dub-dub. Cerebrum in a tub.”

“In Monterey, at the small airport rental agency, he hired a vomit-green Ford Tempo. It was an offense to his refined sense of color. The Tempo's tempo was satisfyingly allegro on flat roads but a bit adagio on the hills.”