Quotes from Dean Koontz

Music-good music, great music-is itself magical, it's mysterious inspiration entwined with the mystery of all things. When we are transported either by Mozart or Glenn Miller, we find ourselves in the presence of the ineffable, for which all words are so in adequate that to attempt to describe it, even with effusive praise and words of perfect beauty, is to engage in blasphemy.

Their melancholy drains me. Their need exhausts me. I am wrung by pity. Sometimes it seems that to exit this world, they must go through my heart, leaving it scarred and sore.

it. At intervals of forty or fifty feet, air monitors were mounted on the right-hand wall. I found no signs of tampering. If the passageway led to the cooling-tower vault, as I was sure that it must, then it would be about four hundred feet long. Twice I thought I heard something behind me. When I looked over my shoulder, nothing loomed. The third time, I refused to succumb to the urge to glance back. Irrational

I do not wish to shine. I prefer shadows, quiet, periods of solitude. I do not wish to be noticed. If one is all but invisible to others, one cannot be envied, inspire anger or suspicion. Near invisibility is a way of life that I recommend.

Even the wisest and the best of us can be foolish occasionally.

Surrender to fear is an invitation to doubt.

After you have suffered great losses and know much pain, it is not cowardice to wish to live henceforth with a minimum of suffering. And 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.

You couldn't be afraid of anything if you were sure you could bear the pain it might cause you.

Furies, Alecto. In classic mythology, Tisiphone and Megaera and Alecto, daughters of the earth goddess Gaea, punished crimes in the name of the victims.

Amazement and astonishment express the momentary overwhelming of the mind by something beyond expectation. Amazement is an emotional response, astonishment an intellectual one.

I believed suddenly not merely in evil as a necessary antagonist in movies and books—bad guys and boogeymen—not merely in evil as the consequence of parental rejection or parental indulgence or social injustice, but in Evil as a presence alive in the world.

You've got to remember whatever happens-it's only life, we all get through it

When a leader used his power over the ruled for the purpose of settling scores and inflating his self-esteem, for remaking society according to his own grand designs, class warfare and genocide ensued.

The thing we want the most is always the thing we cannot have.

There is no other rational response but happiness. Despair is a foolish squandering of precious time.

The dead are sensitive to the living. They have walked this path ahead of us and know our fears, our failings, our desperate hopes, and how much we cherish what cannot last. They pity us, I think, and no doubt they should.

He is not an agent of justice, for there can be little or no real justice in this broken world, where culture and politics are forever redefining the word. Instead, he is an agent of truth, which can't be endlessly redefined, which simply is, though often difficult to uncover. His task is to bring the truth to those who live by lies and deception, and deliver unto them the rightful consequences of their deceit.

What matters is the day at hand and what we do with it, one day at a time, some butter-side-down days, some butter-side-up. And what should we do with the day?

Pico Mundo is a prosperous town. But no degree of prosperity can be sufficient to eliminate all misfortune, and sloth is impervious to opportunity.

We get only one life. We shouldn't waste a day of it in anger.

He had the raw, rough voice of one who had marinated his larynx in whiskey and slow-cooked it in years of cigarette smoke.

The bloody-minded murder those whom they envy, and for what they covet.

Before she risked getting a dog, she also had to find out how she would deal with the loss of Snowball when he died. If losing a mouse wrecked her, then a dog's death would absolutely destroy her, no doubt about it, none at all.

I think to myself, I play to myself, and nobody knows what I say to myself.