Quotes from Dean Koontz

Well," he said, "you can either do the wrong thing and let a loss like that destroy you, or you can do the right thing and be properly grateful for all that came before the loss. Grief should drive you to your knees, but if you stay there forever, you're saying you know better than God how the world should work. And you don't.

The famous British actress Beatrice Lillie was once onstage in Ontario, Canada, performing in Noël Coward's This Year of Grace, the entire cast lined up to one side of her. She was singing "Britannia Rules the Waves," when she mistakenly began to sing the second verse twice, before moving to the third. She realized what she was doing but had to carry forward with it. The cast froze in place instead of moving to center stage—which

BETWEEN BIRTH AND BURIAL, WE FIND OURSELVES in a comedy of mysteries. If

She was so nice to look at that Joe twice stabbed his left foot when he thought he was spearing a bit of litter, though neither wound was serious enough to require a tetanus shot.

our Janice is gone, but you're still here, and your first allegiance should never be to the dead.

Funny how people that don't believe in nothin' are so quick to believe every crazy story about people like us.

We yearn for tomorrow and the progress it represents. But yesterday was once tomorrow, and where was the progress in it?

think much about girls. Considering my long, pale face and hound-dog eyes behind black-rimmed glasses with thick lenses, maybe I already knew that even through adulthood

Each life is a spool of thread that unravels through the years, and it is by a thread that we are so perilously suspended.

because those who cower forget how to stand and, in time, can only crawl.

Humanity is capable of any atrocity," she said. "But when you understand the extent of this cruelty, the unprecedented viciousness, the immense scale of the horror, it seems beyond the power of mere people to conceive and execute. It seems demonic.

the world is a more mysterious place than it seems to be most of the time, when we're plodding along from breakfast to bedtime in a reassuringly familiar routine.

so I start reciting a couple of Shel Silverstein poems I've memorized, and I verse myself all the way across the room to a big round opening you could drive a Mack truck through if you knew how to drive, which I don't.

From birth to death we explore and seek, and in the end we arrive where we started, the past having made one great slow turn on a carousel to become our future, and if we have learned anything worth learning, the carousel will bring us to the one place we most need to be.

The rabid ferocity of his reaction had confirmed Mother's warnings, but I didn't yet comprehend the depth of the revulsion that I inspired or how relentless he would be in his determination to kill me.

Some mysteries bite and bark and come to get you in the dark.

have always been an optimist, because pessimists seldom have any fun and usually fret their way into one of the horrible fates they spend their lives worrying about.

BETWEEN BIRTH AND BURIAL, WE FIND OURSELVES in a comedy of mysteries. If you don't think life is mysterious, if you believe you have it all mapped out, you aren't paying attention or you've anesthetized yourself with booze or drugs, or with a comforting ideology. And if you don't think life's a comedy—well, friend, you might as well hurry along to that burial. The rest of us need people with whom we can laugh. In

Anyway, in those years, I was happy, as to one extent or another I have always been happy. The forest was not a wilderness to me, but served instead as my private garden, comforting in spite of its vastness, and endlessly mysterious. The more familiar a place becomes, the more mysterious it becomes, as well, if you are alert to the truth of things. I have found this to be the case all of my life.

Life is so fragile and uncertain that every daybreak is a miracle, almost a triumph. That first blush in the sky is all the hope of the world distilled into light. I watch the dark fade, and say to myself, "Okay, I'm still here," and the more sunrises I see, the more I feel as if I'll live to see another twenty thousand.

A body of work, therefore, reveals the intellectual and emotional progress of the writer, and is a map of his soul. It's both terrifying and liberating to consider this aspect of being a novelist.

What most people call truth is merely the surface, and under it lies a great depth of truth that they do not perceive.

I'm sure, you'll never again have a problem with a tool or a machine. No more hammered thumbs, no vacuum-cleaner catastrophes. That'll take a second miracle. Because all that clumsiness was never anything but an elaborate excuse not to have a gun, not to learn how to use one.

and women merely because of the way that they treated us. They had anxieties we could never understand. He said that we of the hidden had our burdens, but those who lived in the open carried far heavier burdens than ours, which was true.