Quotes from John Connolly

Before she became ill, David's mother would often tell him that stories were alive. They weren't alive in the way that people were alive, or even dogs or cats. People were alive whether you chose to notice them or not, while dogs tended to make you notice them if they decided that you weren't paying them enough attention. Cats, meanwhile, were very good at pretending people didn't exist at all when it suited them, but that was another matter entirely.

cynics were once romantics. Most of them still are.

The law wasn't a great business to be in if one valued truth, or even justice.

So, how we doin'?" "Same as usual: dead people, a mystery, more dead people." "Who we lost?" "The boy. His guardians. Maybe Elliot Norton." "Shit, don't sound like we got anybody left. Anyone hires you better leave you your fee in their will.

Because to ignore what had happened in the recent and distant pasts, to turn away and look elsewhere because it was easier to do so, was to be an accomplice to the crimes that were committed. To refuse to delve deeper would be to collude with the offenders.

I looked at him, at his unshaven profile, the wisps of dark hair curling out from under his dark wool hat, the empty coffee cup forgotten in his hand. He was a mass of contradictions. It struck me that I was taking life lessons from a five-six semiretired burglar whose boyfriend, not twentyfour hours earlier, had executed a man against a brick wall. My life, I reflected, was taking some strange turns.

all presented one face to the world, and kept another hidden. Nobody could survive in it otherwise.

It's good that you have someone that cares for you. It doesn't make it easier, but it sure doesn't make it harder.

The biggest life change any man would ever experience was the ending of it.

All great art commences with a vision, and perhaps it may be that the vision is closer to God than that which is ultimately created by the artist's brush. There will always be human flaws in the execution. Only in the mind can the artist achieve true perfection.

Nazism was, at heart, a criminal enterprise, a product of which was the Holocaust. The Nazis were gangsters and thugs. As much as they were ideologically driven, they were also greedy. Pure ideologues don't pull gold teeth from the mouths of the dead.

What do you believe in?" asked David. "I believe in those whom I love and trust. All else is foolishness. This god is as empty as his church. His followers choose to attribute all of their good fortune to him, but when he ignores their pleas or leaves them to suffer, they say only that he is beyond their understanding and abandon themselves to his will. What kind of god is that?

One lies in truth, One's truth is lies. One path is death, One path is life. One question asked, The path to guide.

After all, no relationship could function or survive under the burden of total honesty.

I disliked the attitude of those who came up from the cities to hunt—their braggadocio, their faux machismo, the unpleasant transformative effect of guns and camouflage on otherwise unremarkable men, for in my experience it was generally men who hunted in this way.

Badness lingered, and if blood penetrated deep enough into wood, the stain became near permanent. The past gave substance to the present, and all old places were storehouses of memory: the more ancient the site, the greater the accumulation, and bygone atrocities called to new.

He knew there were some who said that those who kept dogs had to resign themselves to their eventual loss because of the animals' relatively short lives. The trick—if "trick" was the right word—was to learn to love the spirit of the animal, and to recognize that it transferred itself from dog to

They were so old, and so strange, that they had found a kind of existence independent of the pages they occupied.

This life is filled with threats and danger, David. We face those that we have to face and there will be times when we must make the choice to act for a greater good, even at risk to ourselves. But we don't lay down our lives needlessly. Each of us has only one life to live and one life to give. There's no glory in throwing it away where there is no hope.

Most criminals are kind of dumb, which is why they're criminals. If they weren't criminals, they'd be doing something else to screw up people's lives, like running elections in Florida

In the end, we'll all face oblivion.

There are places where years have no meaning, where only a hair's breadth of history separates the present from the past. Standing there on that bleak hillside, a young man in a place where other young men had died, it was possible to feel a connection to that past, a sense that in some place further back on the the stream of time these young men were still fighting, and still dying, that they would always be fighting this battle, in this place, over and over again, with ever the same end.

grave emotional injury might somehow have triggered a physical response, so that

Lester Bargus was what people liked to call 'two pounds of shit in a one-pound bag.