Quotes from Dean Koontz

I warned myself against the danger of compassion in this case. How easy it would be to imagine the traumas of childhood that might have deformed her into the moral monster she had become, and then to convince myself that those traumas could be balanced - and their effects reversed - by sufficient acts of kindness.

He had taught me how to be a man when my real father proved not to be much of one himself and incapable of showing a son the way.

Moving the kids was not a good idea, but I sure wanted to see nuns in monster trucks plowing their way through a blizzard.

She says what holds their marriage together is that she feels too damn sorry for him to ask for a divorce.

Unlike the beasts of the wild, the many cruel varieties of human monsters, when at last cornered, seldom fight with greater ferocity. Instead, they reveal the cowardice at the core of their brutality.

one form of heroism, about which few if any films will be made, is having the courage to live without bitterness when bitterness is justified, having the strength to persevere even when perseverance seems unlikely to be rewarded, having the resolution to find profound meaning in life when it seems the most meaningless.

Hope wasn't a cottage industry; it was neither a product that she could manufacture like needlepoint samplers nor a substance she could secrete, in her cautious solitude, like a maple tree producing the essence of syrup. Hope was to be found in other people, by reaching out, by taking risks, by opening her fortress heart.

for laughter is the perfect medicine for the tortured heart, the balm for misery

being admired gives you more power than being feared.

In eighty-six years, child, I've learned the world is a far more mysterious place than most people realize and that every moment of life is woven through with meaning.

Too many years of watching old Warner Bros. cartoons by Chuck Jones can instill in you a silliness gene by proxy.

Such grief might be to them quite delicious, a delicacy.

Everything barbarians do is nothing, no matter how loudly they insist it's something.

If wishes were filet mignon, we'd always eat well at dinner

I don't know if this deception qualified as a half-step down the slippery slope. I had no sensation of sliding. But of course we never notice the descent until we're rocketing along at high velocity.

We spend nine months in a nurturing darkness before we're born, and we aspire to the highest of all places when we die.

That Love is all there is, Is all we know of Love…. —Emily Dickinson

My life would be constrained by the horror and fierce rage that my appearance inspired, but I would know peace as well as fear, tenderness as well as brutality, and even love in a time of cruelty.

They found her with a nearly empty snifter of brandy on the nightstand, a book by her favorite novelist turned to the last page, and a smile on her face.

They spent billions on the problem, with no effect other than to greatly enrich their friends and create more homeless people.

First, it is a mistake to presume to know anyone's internal emotional landscape based on what external emotional signals they seem to be sending. Second, you can apologize for something you have done, but only a fool apologizes for things that other people have done, for he has no authority to do that.

If anyone in your publishing life were to argue against a particular book or a career aspiration for reasons you had not already pondered and rejected after careful analysis, if they dazzled you with brilliant new considerations, then you'd have to back off and revisit your decisions. But what I was told never dazzled me. For example, I was often advised, by different people, that my work would never gain a big audience because my vocabulary was too large.

Finally turning his head, he regarded me appraisingly, with contempt so thick that I expected to hear it drizzle to the floor with a spattering sound.

Denial couldn't be maintained.