Quotes from Dean Koontz

The truth was stranger than the official fiction.

one of those librarians who rules the stacks with an intimidating scowl, whispers quiet sharply enough to lacerate the tender inner tissues of the ear, and will pursue an overdue-book fine with the ferocity of a rabid ferret.

The whisper of the dusk is night shedding its husk.

It's only life. We all get through it.

like a scene from the swamps of Louisiana or the mind of Poe on opium.

Some argued that the youth of today were poorly educated and insufficiently industrious, but one of them had sought to validate his generation by spending considerable time and effort chiseling an obscene word in the concrete picnic table, and he had spelled it correctly.

In memory, she lived and moved and laughed, but all that a photograph could offer was one frozen moment of a life.

The only thing that survives is love, for it is an energy as enduring as light, which travels outward from its source toward the ever-expanding boundaries

Sometimes complex and difficult moral choices are decided less by reason and by right than by sentiment. Perhaps such decisions are paving stones on the road to Hell; if so, my route is well paved, and the welcoming committee all ready knows my name.

Between birth and burial, we find ourselves in a comedy of mysteries. If you don't think life is mysterious, if you believe you have it all mapped out, you aren't paying attention or you've anesthetized yourself with booze or drugs, or with a comforting ideology. And if you don't think life's a comedy - well, friend, you might as well hurry along to that burial. The rest of us need people with whom we can laugh.

Every talent is unearned, however, and with it comes a solemn obligation to use it as fully and as wisely as possible.

Doubt is poison. It leads to a loss of faith in yourself, and in all that's good and true.

Do you know you're bleeding? he asked. I had a suspicion. That looks nasty. My apologies. What happened to your forehead? A fork. A fork? Yes, sir. I wish I'd been eating with a spoon. You stabbed yourself with a fork? It flipped. Flipped? The fork. A flipped fork? It flicked my forehead. Pausing in the counting of my change, he gave me a narrow look. That's right, I said. A flipped fork flicked my forehead.

Being alone can be good. It's easy to find peace alone. But sometimes, being alone is a king of death.

Pure, hard-core liberals believe in a superior race. They think they're it. They believe they're more intelligent than the general run of mankind, better suited than the little people are to manage the little people's lives. They think they have the one true vision, the ability to solve all the moral dilemmas of the century. They prefer big government because that is the first step to totalitarianism, toward unquestioned rule by the elite. And of course they see themselves as the elite.

and she had worn bitterness as though it were a crown.

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.

The joys of life can be found anywhere. Far places only offer exotic ways to suffer.

Tommy told Sal about the strange white-cloth figure with black stitches that he had found on the front porch. Sounds like Pillsbury Doughboy gone punk, Sal said.

Or maybe they were just doing it for fun. A lark. Their religion is tolerant of extreme forms of recreation. Boys will be boys, after all, and sociopathic boys will be sociopathic.

Every world has dogs or their equivalent, creatures that thrive on companionship, creatures that are of a high order of intelligence although not the highest and that therefore is simple enough in their wants and needs to remain innocent. The combination of their innocence and their intelligence allows them to serve as a bridge bewtween what is transient and what is eternal, between the finate and the infinate.

Don't ever call me adorable again. Puppies are adorable.

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

Home is where the heart is. No, nothing quite as simple as that. Home is where you struggle, in a world of endless struggle, to become the best you can be, and it becomes home in your heart only if one day you can look back and say that, in spite of all your faults and failures, it was in this special place where you began to see, however dimly, the shape of your soul.