Quotes from Dean Koontz

How obvious can it be? ... The purpose of makeup is to defy the degradations of time, and time is just a synonym for death.

Shakespeare again. Once you let him into your head, he takes up tenancy and will not leave.

I knew that suffering can purify, that it's a kind of fire that can be worth enduring, but there were degrees of it to which I chose not to subject myself.

He'll also cut you some slack if you're astonishingly stupid in an amusing fashion. Granny claimed that this explains why uncountable millions of breathtakingly stupid people get along just fine in life.

That's life. Something always happens. We don't live in stasis, frozen in amber.

Sometimes waiting is the hardest thing.

He, too, had been glassed-in for a long time, by choice. Now and then he had lifted a hammer to shatter through to something, but he had never struck the blow because he didn't know what he wanted on the other side of the glass.

With blue vinyl-tile floor, pale-green wainscoating, pink walls, a yellow ceiling, and orange-and-white stork-patterned drapes, the expectant fathers' lounge churned with the negative energy of color overload. It would have served well as the nervous-making set for a nightmare about a children's-show host who led a secret life as an ax murderer. The chain-smoking clown didn't improve the ambience.

on a subconscious level we're aware that time isn't enduring, that it is not a required condition of our existence, that there comes a point when we will have no need of it.

Man, I like you. I wish you could like me.

The mommy-porn genre currently sweeping the book industry and the Babylonian excess of most television shows probably fall within the historical norm in our culture's sleaze index and are not omens of the imminent collapse of civilization, though if I were not so busy, I might start building an ark.

A city is half beast and half machine, with arteries of fresh water and veins of foul, nerves of telephone and electrical cables, sewer lines for bowels, pipes full of pressurized steam and others carrying gas, valves and fans and filters and meters and motors and transformers and tens of thousands of interlinked computers, and though its people sleep, the city never does.

Hand-to-hand combat with three hundred pounds of screaming monkey menace is not my idea of a fair fight. My idea of a fair fight is one unarmed, toothless, nearsighted old monkey versus me with a Blackhawk attack helicopter.

Money and beauty are defenses against the sorrows of this world but neither can undo the past. Only time will conquer time. The way forward is the only way back to innocence and to peace.

Hold every moment sacred. Give each clarity and meaning, each the weight of thine awareness, each its true and due fulfillment. —Thomas Mann, The Beloved Returns

Some dreams matter. Most don't. Often it can be hard to know which might be which.

she'd known that being a victim was often a choice people made.

I realized that loving people, depending on them, NEEDING them, is just too dangerous. Love is just a way to set you up for a bad fall. It's the rug they pull out from under you at the very moment you decide that everything's going to be fine. We're all so ephemeral. So fragile. And life's so unpredictable.

If patterns exist in our seemingly patternless lives — and they do — then the law of harmony insists that the most harmonious of all patterns, circles within circles, will most often assert itself.

Sometimes it seems that to exit this world, they must go through my heart, leaving me scarred and sore.

Your past is my Future.

If a man is a beast, he's a beast in his heart, and that's not the kind of heart that beats in you.

People sometimes speak in code, often without realizing they are doing so, as much a mystery to themselves as others.

I had remained hopeful that, among the millions on this Earth, there might be a few who could summon the courage to know me for what I am and have the self-confidence to still walk part of this life with me.