Quotes from Dean Koontz

A fine line separates the weary recluse from the fearful hermit. Finer still is the line between hermit and bitter misanthrope.

We yearn for tomorrow and the progress that it represents. But yesterday was once tomorrow, and where was progress in it? Or we yearn for yesterday, for what was or what might have been. But as we are yearning, the present is becoming the past, so the past is nothing but our yearning for second chances.

If God is an author and the universe is the biggest novel ever written, I may feel as if I'm the lead character in the story, but like every man and woman on Earth, I am a suporting player in one of billions of subplots. You know what happens to supporting players. Too often they are killed off in chapter 3, or in chapter 10, or in chapter 35. A supporting player always has to be looking over his shoulder.

Most people tend to think the best of those who are blessed with beauty; we have difficulty imagining that physical perfection can conceal twisted emotions or a damaged mind.

Darkness dwells within even the best of us. In the worst of us, darkness not only dwells but reins.

Each smallest act of kindness, reverberates across great distances and spans of time --affecting lives unknown to the one who's generous spirit, was the source of this good echo. Because kindness is passed on and grows each time it's passed until a simple courtesy becomes an act of selfless courage, years later, and far away. Likewise, each small meanness, each expression of hatred, each act of evil.

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.

I'm alive but I have no life. I'm alive but also dead. I'm dead and alive.

The most identifying trait of humanity is our abilty to be inhumane to one another.

Fear is a poison produced by the mind, and courage is the antidote stored always ready in the soul

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.

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

But once an idea for a novel seizes a writer...well, it's like an inner fire that at first warms you and makes you feel good but then begins to eat you alive, burn you up from within. You can't just walk away from the fire; it keeps burning. The only way to put it out is to write the book.

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

I am no theologian. I would not be surprised, however, if Heaven proved to be a cozy kitchen, where delicious treats appeared in the oven and in the refrigerator whenever you wanted them, and where the cupboards were full of good books.

Being polite is not only the right way to respond to people but also the easiest. Life is so filled with unavoidable conflict that I see no reason to promote more confrontations.

I am twenty years old. To a world-wise adult, I am little more than a child. To any child, however, I am old enough to be distrusted, to be excluded forever from the magical community of the short and beardless.

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 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.

Alliteration seems to offend people.

Too much mystery is merely an annoyance. Too much adventure is exhausting. And a little terror goes a long way.

More 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.

Hunches [are] just messages from the subconscious, which [is] thinking furiously all the time and processing information we have not consciously noted.

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.