Quotes from John Connolly

When Louis relaxed, it was an indication that a threat was at hand and he was preparing to act, as when an archer releases a breath simultaneously with the flight of an arrow, channeling all of the tension into the flighted missile itself.

Evil, unlike good, is constantly at war with those most like itself, and ambition is its spur.

Being clever is not just about how much you know, but about knowing that you really don't know very much at all.

Every individual spends a lifetime trying to disprove Copernicus by placing him- or herself at the heart of existence, but a small core of diehards manages to turn it into an art.

You've just inherited rudeness. We've had to work at it.

In later life, people will be impressed that you can quote Shakespeare, and you will sound very intelligent. It's harder to quote trigonometry, or quadratic equations, and not half as romantic.

Here is a truth, a truth by which to live: there is hope. There is always hope. If we choose to abandon it, our souls will turn to ash and blow away.

But some gifts are worse than curses, and the dark side of the gift is that they know. The lost, the stragglers, those who should not have been taken but were, the innocents, the struggling, tormented shades, the gathering ranks of the dead, they know. And they come.

That is what we do for the ones we love: we lie to protect them. Not all truths are welcome.

Not every wound needs to be poked and opened, and not every wrong needs to be reexamined, or dragged kicking and screaming into the light. Better just to let the wound heal, even if it doesn't heal quite right, or to leave the wrongs in the dark, and remind yourself not to go stepping into the shadows if you can avoid it.

But the measure of a man was the degree to which he was prepared to inconvenience himself for what was right;

We haunt ourselves, I sometimes think; or, rather, we choose to be haunted. If there is a hole in our lives, then something will fill it. We invite it inside, and it accepts willingly.

The beam caught the bowed head of Angel. He glanced up into Bobby Sciorra's eyes and smiled. Sciorra looked puzzled for a moment and then his mouth opened in slow-dawning realization. He was already turning to try to locate Louis when the darkness seemed to come alive around him and his eyes widened as he realized, too late, that death had come for him too.

They listened to the Beatles for most of the journey, and Hynes explained to Gackowska why Abbey Road was the band's best record, and how Sgt. Pepper's wasn't really a concept album, no matter what anyone claimed to the contrary. Then he had to explain to Gackowska what a concept album was, and a B side, until pretty soon he felt about a hundred years old and was tempted to check himself into a nursing home.

David could tell, by looking at her face as she read, whether or not the story contained in the book was living inside her, and she in it, and he would recall again all that she had told him about stories and tales and the power that they wield over us, and that we in turn wield over them.

When one encounters enough strangeness, then what is strange ultimately becomes familiar. The mind can accommodate itself to almost anything, given time: pain, grief, loss, even the possibility that the dead talk to the living.

Perhaps it's true that all men love their fathers, no matter how terrible the things they do to their sons: there is a part of us that remains forever in debt to those responsible for our existence.

The stories were always looking for a way to be told, to be brought to life through books and reading. That was how they crossed over from their world into ours.

A book is a carrier, and the ideas contained within its covers are an infection waiting to be spread. They breed in men. They adapt according to the host. Books alter men, and men, in their turn, alter worlds.

I]gnorance was never an obstacle to a good sound bite.

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.

because a man who is everybody's friend really has no friends at all.

where there are books, there will always be haters of books alongside the lovers of them.

They listen, the dead. They're always listening. What else is there for them to do?