Quotes from Dean Koontz

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.

We may lack riches, but the greatest fortune is what lies in our hearts.

A short-order cook, just off work, makes easy tracking for lions and worse

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.

The mockery of friends is affectionate, and inoculates against foolishness.

I am the One, and I see all. But the blind man in Apartment 1-A is blind in many ways, as are all human beings, even those with functioning eyes. They are blind to their folly, to their ignorance, to their history, to the future that they will make for themselves. A future born of self-loathing.

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.

Even if God exists, does He know that you do?

You can't fix things with a hug, but you can't make them any worse either.

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

You won't find the truth of life in morbidity, only in hope.

Not all or even most suffering is at the hands of fate; it befalls us at our invitation.

After once having made the mistake of watching television news, I had worried for a while about an asteroid hitting the earth and wiping out human civilization. The anchorwoman had said it was not merely possible but probable. At the end of the report, she smiled.

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

Imagine that you are more than nothing. Evil made you, but you are no more evil than a child unborn. If you want, if you seek, if you hope, who is to say that your hope might not be answered?

One door away from heaven And the key is ours to lose. One door away from heaven But oh, the entry dues.

When I am battered and oppressed by the world that humanity has made - which is difference from the world that is was given - my primary defense, my consolation, is the absurdity of that world

Language can't describe reality. Literature has no stable reference, no real meaning. Each reader's interpretation is equally valid, more important than the author's intention. In fact, nothing in life has meaning. Reality is subjective. Values and truths are subjective. Life itself is a kind of illusion. Blah, blah, blah, let's have another scotch.

Human beings, however, were different from apples and oranges: The flavor of the peel did not reliably predict the taste of the pulp.

I never knew whether I was drawn to eccentric people or if they were drawn to me.

Son, this is the United States of America. Some would say it's unconstitutional to try to prevent psychopaths from fulfilling their potential.

There is no end of wonders and mysteries: fireflies and music boxes, the stars that outnumber all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the world, pinhead eggs that become caterpillars that dissolve into genetic soup from which arise butterflies, that some hearts are dark and others full of light.

Perhaps you have always known everything important but will need a lifetime to discover what you know.

There were two types of survivors in life: those, like her, who found the requisite strength in having once been loved with great intensity; and those who, having not been loved, learned to thrive on hatred, suspicion, and the meager rewards of revenge.