Quotes from John Connolly

The trees were almost bare, making their branches appear as cracks in the cosmos.

chased by the shadows of clouds.

Waneth the watch, but the world holdeth. —Anonymous, "The Seafarer

He had counted so carefully. He had abided by the rules, but life had cheated. This world was not like the world of his stories.

The Crooked Man believed that whatever evil lay in men was there from the moment of their conception, and it was only a matter of discovering its nature in a child.

A little fragment of his heart came loose and was lost to him each time he had to say goodbye to her.

After all, not doing bad things is not the same as doing good things, but that is why you and I will never become saints.

Most people are not bad. Oh, they do bad things sometimes, and we all have a little badness in us, but very few people are unspeakably evil, and most of the bad things they do seem perfectly reasonable to them at the time. Perhaps they're bored, or selfish, or greedy, but, for the most part, they don't actually want to hurt anyone when they do bad things. They just want to make their own lives a little easier.

Angel and Louis in particular could have catalyzed a coma victim back to consciousness. He knew where Parker and the others were

Mr. Renfield didn't like the Abernathys, exactly, but a funny thing about adults is that they will spend time with people they don't like very much if they think it might benefit them.

And why do you imagine that we would want beauty? Beauty mocks us, for we have none. Goodness appalls us, because we have no goodness. We are all that this world is not, and we are all that you are not.

Así eran las vidas: cuando sus caminos se cruzaban, quedaban alteradas para siempre por el encuentro, unas veces de una manera leve, casi invisible, y otras de forma tan profunda que ya nada podía ser después igual. El residuo de otras vidas nos contagia, y nosotros a nuestra vez lo transmitimos a quienes encontramos más adelante

In the space of one night, [I] had gone through the possessions of my dead wife and child, sorting, discarding, smelling the last traces of them that clung to their clothing like the ghosts of themselves.

Yonder come little David With his rock and sling I don't wanna meet him, He's a dangerous man. —"Sit Down Servant" (Traditional)

On more than one occasion David, in his urge to explore the darker corners of the bookshelves, had found himself wearing strands of spider silk in his face and hair, causing the web's resident to scuttle into a corner and crouch balefully, lost in thoughts of arachnid revenge.

This was a fundamentally changed man, one who had come back strengthened, not weakened, by what he had endured, but who was also both less and more than he once had been. For

had been like wandering into the wrong carnival sideshow, the kind that left one feeling sick and slightly soiled.

he had more days behind him than ahead.

there were a lot of people out there who had no right to be carrying even a sharpened pencil, never mind a loaded weapon.

gazing upon him with eyes that were too old for her face.

were pressed into service, although

himself with a kind of loose-limbed

He is not bitter. Never that. Babe would have said it was not worth becoming bitter, and Babe would have been right. But he is sad, sad that they do not care as much as he does.

We all know that books burn—yet we have the greater knowledge that books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. . . . In this war, we know, books are weapons. —Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882–1945)