Quotes from Dean Koontz

On the other hand, dogs eat with gusto, play with exuberance, work happily when given the opportunity, surrender themselves to the wonder and the mystery of their world, and love extravagantly.

Dogs needed no words to console you. Dogs were the ultimate practitioners of the therapy of touch. Dogs knew and accepted the hard realities of life that human beings could not acknowledge until those obvious truths were exhaustively described with words, and even then there was often more bitter acknowledgment than humble acceptance.

Humanity is a parade of fools and I'm at the front, twirling a baton

This may be the primary purpose of dogs: to restore our sense of wonder and to help us maintain it, to make us consider that we should trust our intuition as they trust theirs and to help us realize that a thing known intuitively can be as real as anything known by material experience.

You amaze me and scare me. I can't figure where you came from or how you got to be what you are, but you couldn't have come where you're more needed.

Child, do you know where trult great courage comes from, the kind of courage that will never back down?' I said, Faith. And love, she said. faith is a kind of love you know. Love of what is unseen but certain. Love makes us strong and brave.

My point of view is this: If you like root-beer floats so much, have one on Monday, another on Tuesday, and a third on Wednesday.

It is also essential that good men and women not be educated and propagandized into believing that real evil is a myth and that all malevolent behavior is merely the result of a broken family's or a failed society's shortcomings, amenable to cure by counseling and by the application of new economic theory.

In this world where too many are willing to see only the light that is visible, never the Light Invisible, we have a daily darkness that is night, and we encounter another darkness from time to time that is death, the deaths of those we love, but the third and most constant darkness that is with us every day, at all hours of every day, is the darkness of the mind, the pettiness and meanness and hatred, which we have invited into ourselves, and which we pay out with generous interest.

Throughout history, whole societies that seemed stable have imploded when self-righteous narcissists, enflamed by insane ideologies, so threatened the larger population of the sane that soon everyone feared to stand against the violence, whereupon madness accelerated. No one seemed to remember the lessons of history—or cared to learn them.

In this world, Evil works through countless surrogates. Its name is Legion. But Good works through surrogates, as well, and they are legion, too.

Martie came out of the office first, smiling prettily, and Dusty rose to greet her, smiling less prettily, and Dr. Ahriman entered the waiting room behind her, smiling paternally, and maybe Dusty smiled a little more prettily when he saw the psychiatrist, because the man virtually radiated competence and compassion and confidence and all sorts of good stuff.

Chyna Shepherd, untouched and alive and able to pee.

Paper clip. Ping. Disaster. Colonel Bowie is down. Colonel Bowie is down! The Mexican Army is now leaderless. Capone gloats.

Perhaps this was a day of firsts. The day one dies, of course, is a first in any life.

he knew that fate was only a mythological concept

The only way back from such a bleak despondency is to shape humiliation into humility, to strive always to triumph over the darkness while never forgetting that the honor and the beauty are more in the striving than in the winning. When triumph at last comes, our efforts alone could not have won the day without that grace which surpasses all understanding and which will, if we allow it, imbue our lives with meaning.

Every expression of desired friendship has potential bite. Every smile reveals the teeth.

Evil never dies. It just changes faces.

Truly tough guys never say they're tough.

She was reduced to the dependency of an infant, too terrified of life itself to find solace anywhere but in the familiar succoring breast and in the sound of that same heartbeat remembered from the womb.

In time she said, I love you, Oddie. My voice was thick when I replied. I love you more than life." We'll be okay, she said. We are okay. We're weird and screwed-up, but we're okay, she agreed. If someone invented a thermometer that measured weirdness, it would melt under my tongue. But you-you're cool.

Framed behind glass is a card from a carnival fortune-telling machine. It promises you are destined to be together forever.

He considered razing the house and rebuilding, but he realized that houses are not haunted, and regardless of the architecture with which we surround ourselves,our ghosts stay with us until we ourselves are ghosts.