Quotes from Dean Koontz

Prediluvian—out of date, ancient, before Noah and the Flood, white male thinking at its worst.

the optimist, unlike the pessimist, believes that life has meaning, that there is something to learn from every adversity, and even that the absurdity of such an excess of misfortune will likely seem at least somewhat amusing after enough time has passed. That is why, years after they have lost everything, optimists are frequently richer and happier than ever, while pessimists often had nothing to lose in the first place.

disquietude

Writing isn't a source of pain. It's psychic chemotherapy. It reduces your psychological tumors and relieves your pain.

Maybe it's just that before anything came the word, and words are the roots of everything that our senses perceive. 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.

They followed the light and the shadow, and the light led them forward to light and the shadow led them to darkness. —T. S. ELIOT, Choruses from The Rock, VII

those naive souls who believe what authorities tell them in the name of science.

Even after all these uneventful years on Jacob's Ladder, I still lock the door every night.

She doesn't ask him about drones.

Wealth had not corrupted him. What he'd chosen to do with his wealth corrupted him. First he insulated himself from ordinary human experience, and then deemed himself superior to the masses, excused himself from all constraints not only of morality but also of tradition, and subsequently felt justified in casting off his conscience as a worthless artifact of primitive and superstitious minds. He had made of himself a malignancy in the human community.

One of Dorian Purcell's rules for living a good life was that no matter what you were doing, whether it was building a giant tech company or banging your mistress, breaking a competitor and driving him into ruin or playing pinball, you had to commit to it as if it was everything, as if your very survival depended on it.

despaired that so many people, born with the knowledge of intuition and with the ability to reason, shaped their lives instead by sheer emotion. So many were swept away by boldfaced lies and swayed into currents of vicious fantasies, until they were so far from

Live, Katie. Live for me. Live for the girls. Live for us. As long as you live, we'll still live in you.

I wept a little. Sometimes I do. I'm not embarrassed by tears. At times like this, tears exorcise emotions that would otherwise haunt me and, by their haunting, embitter me.

says, "If you're concerned about the environmental effects of the flatulence of cattle, don't be. It's a myth. What'll kill us all is the flatulence of politicians.

She wondered if she might be alone in this disquiet or whether these days other people experienced it as well, and she suspected that all of them knew the feeling whether they would admit it or not.

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 supporting player in one of billions of subplots. You know what happens to supporting players. Too often they are killed off in chapter three or in chapter ten, or in chapter thirty-five. A supporting player always has to be looking over his shoulder.

In the relationship between humanity and dogs, some mutual destiny existed that had not yet been fulfilled.

He ejects the depleted magazine from the

beyond every darkness, dawn approached

I'm not getting forgetful. I'm not that old. Yet first my slippers, now the door lock.

The day is cool.

Carson heard that expression more often these days—It is what it is—and it nettled him every time someone spoke it. He wanted to say to Eckman, You are what you are, and now I know what that is.

That is the Promise she made, to live for them. But she has been doing little more than surviving.