Quotes from Dean Koontz

That's life. Always something, more good than bad, but always interesting if you're paying attention.

After all, a society with such an enlightened tolerance of corruption and savagery needed to bear down hard on minor offenses to convince itself that it still had standards.

I assure you the law isn't a line engraved in marble, immovable and unchangeable through the centuries. Rather...the law is like a string, fixed at both ends but with a great deal of play in it-very loose, the line of the law-so you can stretch it this way or that, rearrange the arc of it so you are always-short of the blantant theft or cold-blooded murder-safely on the right side.

Scourges assumed authority they had not been granted. They made a carefully reasoned decision to kill in greater numbers than were absolutely necessary to save themselves and the innocents who needed their protection. Scourges transgressed against social and sacred order... Scourges themselves are always scourged.

Los Angeles was the most glamorous, tackiest, most elegant, seediest, most clever, dumbest, most beautiful, ugliest, forward-looking, retro-thinking, altruistic, self-absorbed, deal-savvy, politically ignorant, artistic-minded, criminal-loving, meaning-obsessed, money-grubbing, laid-back, frantic city on the planet. And any two slices of it, as different as Bel Air and Watts, were nevertheless uncannily alike in essence: rich with the same crazy hungers, hopes, and despairs.

there were two types of survivors in life: those, like her, who found the requisite strength in having once been loved with great intensity; and those who, having not been loved, learned to thrive on hatred, suspicion, and the meager rewards of revenge. They were at once scornful of the need for human feeling and envious of the capacity for it.

The singing wasn't the hopscotch-jumprope-happy kind. This was the kind of singing that, if you tracked it to its source, you might find a little girl in a moldy old burial dress, her skin pitted & green, with lots of coffin splinters & dirt between her teeth... ...like a mermaid luring idiot sailors...Winny wasn't a sailor, & he wasn't old enough to get all sexed up by some hot siren.

The dance of life occurred not yesterday or tomorrow, but only here at the still point that was the present. This truth is simple, self-evident, but difficult to accept, for we sentimentalize the past and wallow in it, while we endure the moment and in every waking hour dream of the future.

Perhaps nothing in this broken world can be pure or of a piece, unfractured.

For the first time, he considered that utter indifference might inspire not inner peace but a limitless capacity for evil.

You don't need to like [a gun] to know you got to have it. I don't like gettin' a colonoscopy every five years, but I grit my teeth and drop my drawers and get it done just the same.

You must never lie to yourself, or you are left with no one to trust.

To generations of the willfully blind, true beauty can remain unseen in plain sight, but beauty sooner or later asserts itself—always, always, always—and is at last recognized, because there's so damn little of it.

I suspect she must speak without emotion or otherwise entirely lose the self-control that is required to speak to me at all.

Of course, one must always remember that although The Sound of Music is the most feel-good movie musical of all time, it is crammed full of Nazis.

The past cannot be redeamed. What has been and what might have been both bring us to what is. To know grief, we must be in the river of time, because grief thrives in the present and promises to be with us in the future until the end point. Only time conquers time and its burdens. There is no grief before or after time, which is all the consolation we should need.

This isn't a stupid horror movie, odd one. It's never too late to do the intelligent thing.

Terror and pleasure are linked in us. We are a baldly miswired species, Martie. Terror delights us, both the experience of terror and the dealing out of it to others. We are healthier if we admit to this miswiring and do not struggle to be better than our natures allow.

Don't mourn the death of monsters, dear. Celebrate the saving of the innocents.

Belief and trust, twined together, can meet any danger.

love was the closest thing to immortality that men would ever know and that the only--and best--answer to death is loving. Loving.

Ideas shouldn't matter more than people." He

although we universally celebrate imagination, it is in fact a power that can uplift us and save us --- or as easily demean and destroy us. Mozart imagined great music. Hitler imagined death camps and built them.

Whatever task you've taken, whatever fight you're facing, you must bring to it nothing less than everything you've got, or otherwise you'll fail for sure and always wonder what might have been if only you had given your all.