Quotes from Dean Koontz

Even if there are moments during the day when all seems normal and when every action of your own and of those around you seems to be unremarkable, the appearance of ordinariness is an illusion, and just below the placid surface, the world is seething.

In life, little happens by chance, and most bad hands we're dealt are the consequence of our actions, which are shaped by our wisdom and our ignorance. In my experience, survival depends on hoping for the best while recognizing that disaster is more likely and that it can't be averted if it can't be imagined.

In fact, time teaches us that the musical score of life oscillates between that of Psycho and that of The Sound of Music, with by far the greatest number of our days lived to the strains of an innocuous and modestly budgeted picture, sometimes a romance, sometimes a light comedy, sometimes a little art film of puzzling purpose and elusive meaning.

For a better part of a decade, he had been outside society, distanced in mind and spirit if not in body. But now, for the first time since Centeral America, Jack Twist had the need, the desire, and ability to reach out to society around him, to make friends.

Taking refuge in the hopeless nature of anything was just a form of cowardice.

If she fully embraced life with all its conflicts, she would suffer a breakdown.

We have within us the ability to change for the better and to find dignity as individuals rather than as drones in one mass movement or another. We have the ability to love, the need to be loved, and the willingness to put our own lives on the line to protect those we love

But just when a man expects he's earned the littlest bit of milk and honey, the world throws a load of horseshit at him.

Curtis' mother always said that the better you know others, the better you will know yourself, and that in the fullest sharing of experience, we learn the wisdom of the world.

The more familiar that a place becomes, the more mysterious it becomes, as well, if you are alert to the truth of things.

The less I have, the less I can lose.

Strange how the deepest part of us isn't able to speak more clearly to the part of us that lives only here in the shallows of the world.

Where does fiction end and reality begin?

Although he never speaks of how or what or why, I know that his childhood was difficult, that his parents broke his heart. Books and excess poundage are his insulation against pain.

she ran for the only medicine that reliably cured any bout of unpleasant feelings: a book.

I need useful work to keep my mind occupied, but I'd like to find work where it's...quieter.

You do what you have to do. That's who you seem to be to me, anyway. You're one who does what he has to do.

Life is finding people you love and then losing them, sometimes after sixty years, sometimes after a few months or even a week, all the loss meant to keep you humble and remind you that your life is likewise stamped with an expiration date, so that you'll use your days to the best of your ability, in the service of what is good.

That I had come full circle shouldn't have surprised me, for we are born into time only to be born out of it, after living through the cycles of the seasons, under stars that turn because the world turns, born into ignorance and acquiring knowledge that ultimately reveals to us our enduring ignorance: The circle is the essential pattern of our existence.

Sometimes your life rolls away with you, like a big stone going downhill fast

some people are devils in their own right, their telltale horns having grown inward to facilitate their disguise.

Even when God is your co-pilot, it pays to pack a parachute.

Imminent death didn't terrify her as much as did the prospect of having lived a life in perpetual retreat, a life that would amount now to so much less than she'd ever hoped,...

Expressed in Latin, it would have read Exi, impie, exi, scelerate, exi cum omnia fallacia tua, which translates into English as "Depart, impious one, depart, accursed one, depart with all your deceits.