Quotes from Dean Koontz

Lying won't get you anything but misery.

She said you need to eat well, say prayers without fail each morning and night, and avoid drinking strong spirits. One problem. Drinking strong spirits is how I pray.

He is like a man living through the night before doomsday, with full knowledge that the sun will go nova in the morning, yet unable to enjoy the precious pleasures of this world because all his energy is devoted to wishing desperately that the foreseen end will not, after all, come to pass.

What we had both done was keep on keeping on, which is all any of us can do.

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.

If you have to pay the bills, and you write something you're not proud of, use a pen-name for that.

Sorrow is not a raven perched persistently above a chamber door. Sorrow is a thing with teeth, and while in time it retreats, it comes back at the whisper of its name.

mankind was, in reality, the most ruthless, dangerous, unforgiving species on earth.

Norman Bates was happy just dressing up like his mother and stabbing people," Chief Porter said, "but Hannibal Lecter has to cut off their faces and eat their livers with fava beans. The role models have become more intense.

Regardless of how rough we may appear on the exterior, each of us had a human heart.

Never waste energy beating yourself up. Other people are always standing in line to do it.

Pero nadie es por completo honesto con todo el mundo, siempre y en todos los aspectos. Qué diantre, la necesidad de engañar no es más que otra de las maldiciones que debe soportar nuestra pobre especie.

good men and women not be educated and propagandized into believing that real evil is a myth and that all malevolent behavior is merely the result of a broken family's or a failed society's shortcomings, amenable to cure by counseling and by the application of new economic theory.

was not merely weak but also evil to throw away your life when so many had their lives or the promise of their future taken from them by cruel people or by the brutal forces of nature.

Because when you're doing it, then it's just something you do. But if you talk about it, then it's something you are

His base sins were envy - of beauty, of happiness - and pride, bending the whole world to his view of creation, and these were the greatest sins of all, the same transgressions over which the devil himself, once an archangel, had stumbled and fallen a long way out of Heaven.

because truth is always and only what it is

I can't allow myself to be wary of one place merely because it reminds me of another place where I almost died, because just about every place reminds me of another place...

My parents didn't raise me to ask God for blessings or benefits. For guidance, yes. For the strength to do the right thing, yes. Not for a winning lottery number, not for love or health, or happiness. Prayer is not a gimme list; God isn't Santa Claus.

The news isn't all the news, Jonah. Not by a long shot. It's just what reporters want to tell you about. Riots come and go, wars come and go, but under the tumult, day after day, century after century, millions of people are doing nice things for one another, making sacrifices, mostly small things, but it's all those little kindnesses that hold civilization together, all those people who live quiet lives and never make the news.

I'm serious,' he said, though aware of how odd it was that he should choose to inform his wife of a personal crisis by comparing it to the experiences of a mystery novel heroine whom he had created. Was the dividing line between life and fiction as hazy for other people as it sometimes was for a writer? And if so... was there a book in that idea?

what is right is not always clean, and does not always feel good. In even a clear heart, some righteous acts of the harder kind can stir up a sediment of guilt, but that is not a bad thing. If allowed to be, the heart is self-policing, and a reasonable measure of guilt guards against corruption.

But by nature, the human heart yearns most for what it cannot have.

isn't a source of pain. It's psychic chemotherapy. It reduces your psychological tumors and relieves your pain.