Quotes from John Connolly

I had met plain women, even ugly women, whose physical shortcomings had been remedied by the spirit within, their decency and kindness even effecting a kind of transformation upon them, softening the bluntness of their features. This was not such a woman. The blight was inside her, and no restyling of her hair, no careful use of cosmetics, no pretty dresses could have made her any less unsettling than she was.

Regret, he now knew, was a useless emotion, the poor cousin of guilt.

The trick was not to stifle the emotions, but to control them. Love, anger, grief – all were weapons in their way, but they needed to be kept in check.

In any given situation, the most difficult step is to reach a decision. Once a decision is made, control can be asserted.

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.

Came from nothing- less than nothing, because the poor always enter this life with their account in deficit, and generally leave it in much the same condition...

It didn't matter whether a thing existed or not. What mattered was the trouble caused by those who believed in its existence.

A job, in their view, was a job, and, as with most jobs, you just had to find that perfect balance between doing as little as possible so you didn't get tired, and just enough so that you didn't get fired.

Law and justice are not the same.

Stories come alive in the telling. (…)They lay dormant, hoping for the chance to emerge. Once someone started to read them, they could begin to change. They could take root in the imagination and transform the reader. Stories wanted to be read.

We lose ourselves by degrees: our youth, our souls.

V-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y, David explained that without slates on the roof, the rain would get in. In their way, they were just as important as walls. Dr. Moberley asked David if he was afraid of the rain getting in. David told him that he didn't like getting wet. It wasn't so bad outside, especially if you were dressed for it, but most people didn't dress for rain indoors.

But I feared more the death of others. I did not want to lose them, I worried about them while they were alive. Sometimes I think I concerned myself so much with the possibility of their loss that I never truly took pleasure in the fact of their existence.

I learned something that day: there may be worse things than arriving somewhere with your dog and leaving without him, but there aren't many.

He was just thinking aloud, ruling out possibilities by releasing them into the air, like canaries in the coal mine of his mind.

After all this time, he had hope, and then hope was gone, and he hates himself for giving in to hope. He, who exists only to kill the hopes of others, could not destroy the hope within himself.

It was human nature. You didn't give everything away; if you did, you would have nothing left. There were those who took the view that there was a liberation in the act of confession, but mostly they tended to be the ones who were listening, and not the ones confessing. The only full confessions occur on deathbeds; all others are partial, modified.

what human beings did: they tried and failed and failed again, and they kept failing until either they got it right at last or time ran out and they had to settle for what they had.

Instead, there was only the kind of silence that comes when someone takes away a clock to be repaired and after a time you become aware of its absence because its gentle, reassuring tick is gone and you miss it so.

When did you get so clever?" "When I realized that I wasn't as clever as I thought

The four ages of man, as far as Williamson was concerned, were confusion, anger, complacency, and grumpiness, but it was important to embrace them in the right order. The

We must have taken a wrong turn turning somewhere." "Where, Purgatory?" said Dozy. "We're in Hell.

As for dying, he didn't believe that he was frightened of it: the manner of it, perhaps, but not the fact of it. After all, he had reached an age where dying had started to become an objective reality instead of an abstract concept.

The law doesn't require truth, only the appearance of it. Most cases simply rest on a version of it that's acceptable to both sides. You want to know the only truth is? Everybody lies.--Elwin Stark