Quotes from Dean Koontz

ravaged kidney; but, God willing, she would be able to enjoy a full life with the one that remained.

Stories were the greatest blessing of intelligence. They were food for the soul. They were medicine.

Is this not pathetic, Odd, what some ill-educated fool has done? I take solace in reminding myself that 'art is long and critics are the insects of a day.'" "Shakespeare?" I asked. "No. Randall Jarrell. A wonderful poet, now all but forgotten because modern universities teach nothing but self-esteem and toe-sucking.

To the police, Lily said [speaking of five murders], these five brutal murders are less than coincidence. One of them told me, 'There's no conspiracy, Lily. It's just life.' How do they come to think this way--that death is life? That unnatural death and murder are somehow a natural part of life?

Haven't you noticed, insanity is the new normal?

It's immeasurably easier to live in a world that's all surfaces, that means nothing and demands nothing of you.

What do people get from all that devil mumbo-jumbo anyway?" "A sense of purpose, I guess." "They could volunteer at an animal shelter instead." "Yes, sir. But then they wouldn't get to have group sex while wearing goat horns or kill people for fun.

I've seen things that I don't understand but that nonetheless delight me.

Then perhaps you shouldn't sleep. The imagination has terrifying power.

Carpe noctem

Any town can die without actually drying up and blowing away. It can be as dead as a ghost town even with people still living in it." Gazing

In twenty-one years, I have not considered changing to Todd. The bizarre course of my life suggests that Odd is more suited to me, whether it was conferred by my parents with intention or fate.

In the hollow steel-lined bin, my unfortunate eruption resonated such that it would have humiliated me if my first concern had been social acceptance. My first concern, however, was survival. At the moment, I didn't have the capacity for embarrassment because terror filled me.

Nature frequently works to impress upon us our absurdity and thereby remind us that we are not the masters of the universe that we like to suppose we are.

I'm sure that your life is filled with as much happiness, charm, wonder, and abiding fear as anyone could wish.

At his passing, there was not even an eddy in the snow, neither the briefest glimpse of the occluded moon nor the faintest stirring through the trees. In this regard, her death, when sooner or later it came, would be like his: the world indifferent, turning smoothly onward toward the fascination of another dawn.

What's dropped your heart into your shoes?

It looks awful lonely here. Most of the world is lonely corners. I'm not sure it's safe. Nowhere is safe unless you want it to be.

Every hour in every life contains such often-unrecognized potential to affect the world that the great days for which we, in our dissatisfaction, so often yearn are already with us; all great days and thrilling possibilities are combined always in this momentous day.

Knowing the names of things is a way to pay respect to the beauty of the world...

An elaborately jointed array of bones landed in my lap, spasming like a broken crab. My cry was every bit as manly as that of a young schoolgirl surprised by a hairy spider. I knocked the thing off me, onto the floor. It

Dedicated Practitioners of Evil," or DPEs.

Asshole." "Your mother never taught you words like that." "You don't know my mother," she said thickly.

The best part of a Mr. Goodbar is not the wrapper, is it? No, and the best part of a Coke is not the can. On those nights when you lie awake, either man or boy, wondering about yourself, peeling away one layer of oddness after another, you should remember and always be grateful that the woefully imperfect person that you are, with all your contradictions and unworthy desires, is not the best of you, any more than the wrapper is the best part of a Mr. Goodbar.