Quotes from John Connolly

If it is true that nature abhors a vacuum, then criminality regards it as a business opportunity.

One ignored the mundane at one's peril.

I'm Episcopalian. I believe in everything.

The Guardian might have represented many of the liberal values that Frend disdained, but he did not think it would be the first choice of journal for someone intent on torturing and killing a kidnap victim, even if it were only to be used as a prop.

reading was a solitary pursuit. Oh, one could read in the same room as someone else, or beside them in bed at night, but it rather presumed that an agreement had been reached about such matters, and the couple in question consisted of a pair of like-minded souls.

A false friend is more dangerous than an open enemy. Francis Bacon (1561–1626)

There is no genius. There is only the work. There is no art. There is only the craft.

Quayle himself was a surprisingly elegant man of sixty winters or more. (One might equally have said "sixty springs" or "sixty summers," but that would have been inaccurate, for Quayle was a man of bare trees and frozen water.)

When it comes time, you only have to ask. You call our names, you hear? You call our names. Parker put his head in his hands and wept.

who wore her makeup so thick that you could have carved your initials into her face without drawing blood.

There are people whose eyes you must avoid, whose attention you must not draw to yourself. They are strange, parasitic creatures, lost souls seeking to stretch across the abyss and make fatal contact with the warm, constant flow of humanity. They live in pain and exist only to visit that pain on others. A random glance, the momentary lingering of a look, is enough to give them the excuse they seek.

Eventually the Woodsman spoke. 'We all have our routines,' he said softly. 'But they must have a purpose and provide an outcome that we can see and take some comfort from, or else they have no use at all. Without that, they are like the endless pacings of a caged animal. If they are not madness itself, then they are a prelude to it.

And the ignorant, as always, will be wrong.

was extraordinarily unhandsome, as though God had created the ugliest human being possible and then punched him in the face.

The hatred for ex-soldiers on the part of those who had not fought was something I could not understand. They wanted us to disappear. There were no more parades now, no more kisses on the cheek. Soldiers were no more than beggars, and nobody likes a beggar. Perhaps we made them feel guilty by our presence. They might have preferred it had we all died in the mud and been buried far from England in places whose names we had not even learned to pronounce properly before we perished.

Mortality shadowed him like a falcon mantling its wings over dying prey.

a sadness that turned the world to gray. He

Don't ask us what it's like in that moment when the body skitters away from that stupid sheepy shape of breath. Down here, no one asks. We all died boot to throat. We all went out shrieking some bloody name. ~Danielle Pafunda, "The Dead Girls Speak in Unison

carried the smell of the streets with him.

multibacillary and paucibacillary

The Woodsman smiled. "They were all my children," he said. "Every one that was lost, every one that was found, every one that lived, and every one that died: all, all were mine, in their way.

And I told him that I believed in God because I had seen His opposite. I had seen all that He was not, and been touched by it, and so I could no more deny the possibility of an ultimate goodness to set against such depravity than I could deny that daylight followed darkness, and night the day.

it takes time to get used to a strange house, especially one as old as this. Even I sometimes find myself looking over my shoulder when I'm alone in it. It's the way of such places, isn't it? They wear their history heavily.

Ears were blocked to reason, and eyes blocked to goodness.