Quotes from John Connolly

pulled on a pair of gloves, just

This world is full of broken things: broken hearts, broken promises, broken people ? The Unquiet

This world was not like the world of his stories.

Benny's was more of a restaurant than a bar, assuming you were prepared to be generous with your definition of a restaurant ... A menu board on the wall above had adjustable plastic letters and numbers arranged into the kind of prices that hadn't changed since Elvis died, and the kinds of food choices that had helped kill him.

it had been a small consecration, a minor epiphany, and no more

If you really want to annoy someone, you can make little inverted commas by holding up two fingers of each hand and twitching them gently, as though you're tickling an invisible elf under the armpits. For example, when your mother calls you for dinner, and dinner turns out to be boiled fish and broccoli, you can say to her, "Well, I'll just eat my 'dinner', then," and do the little fingers sign. She'll love it. Seriously. I can hear her laughing already.

more than that, but sometimes such moments are all that we are given, and they are enough to fuel us, and give us hope that, somewhere down the line, another might be gifted.

Those whom you care about—lovers, children—will fall by the wayside, and your love will not be enough to save them.

Now he preferred his newspapers, with their long columns of print, each letter painstakingly laid out by hand to create something that would lose its relevance almost as soon as it appeared on the newsstands, the news within already old and dying by the time it was read, quickly overtaken by events in the world beyond.

She laughed loudly. It sounded to her husband like someone pushing a witch in a barrel over a waterfall. He pictured his wife in a barrel falling into very deep water, and this cheered him up a bit.

Around them, the city moved to its own hidden heartbeat, a rhythm that varied from hour to hour, tied to the movements of the individuals that inhabited it so that sometimes he found it hard to tell if the city dictated the lifestyles of its people, or the people influenced the life of the city.

Perhaps it was just a function of realizing, as the years went by, how little he really knew about very much at all.

Most writers tend to create characters who are like them – only slightly better looking, taller, younger and more witty

And the Crooked Man heard her dreams, because that was where he wandered. His place was the land of the imagination, the world where stories began.

how the ruins of a Saxon settlement might provide the foundations for a Roman garrison, that garrison give way to a Norman fortress, the fortress to a medieval town

On Sundays, the priest would often explain the Bible story that had just been read out loud. David didn't always listen because the priest was very dull indeed, but it was surprising what the priest could see in stories that seemed quite simple to David. In fact, the priest appeared to like making them more complicated than they were, probably because it meant that he could talk for longer.

Anyone who spent time in a courtroom emerged with scars. The only variables were quantity and depth.

Only an idiot asks questions like "Have you read all of these books?" or "Have you listened to all of those CDs?" Seriously, there should be a number that one can call under those circumstances, after which a squad of big blokes will arrive at one's door and beat the questioning fool unconscious with a pristine copy of À la recherche du temps perdu , or that collection of the Complete Works of Beethoven that was just too cheap to pass up.

And you?" said Roland. "You're only a boy. You don't belong here. Aren't you frightened?

There are gods within gods.

ABOVE PASTOR'S BAY SIX ravens flew low, barely rising over the skeletal trees. High in the clear blue sky the last geese were heading south, but the ravens moved north toward forests and mountains, toward ice and snow. They flew fast and sure into the coming dark, that they might tell the waiting wolf of all they had seen.

A great book that claimed that the end of the world, based on a close examination of the Bible, would occur in 1783, had largely retreated into madness, refusing to believe that the present date was any later than 1782, for to do so would be to admit that its contents were wrong and that its existence therefore had no purpose beyond that of a mere curiosity.

and conniving where he was clever.

Sometimes he imagines himself peeling away Babe's integuments, excavating the seams, so that Babe becomes thinner and thinner, smaller and smaller, until at last all that remains is the shining core of the man, the radiance within. But Babe is immune from such exploration, and when disease finally pares away the layers of Babe, all that is left is death.