Dean Koontz Quotes - Page 6

Recognizing the structure of your psychology doesn't mean that you can easily rebuild it.

These days, all I ask of Fate is that the people she hurls into my life, whether they are evil or good, or morally bipolar, should be amusing to one degree or another. This is a big request to make of busy Fate, who has billions of lives to keep in constant turmoil.

...it will be a world made not bright but brighter, not clean but cleaner.

We don't have time for such uncertainty because it reliably breeds indecision, and indecision is one of the mothers of failure.

Maybe the devil in human beings isn't the reflection of the devil, perhaps the devil is only a reflection of the savagery and brutality of our kind. Maybe what we've done is create the devil in our own image

She would have thought that working and living in continuous happiness, harmony, and security day after day would lead to mental lethargy, that her writing would suffer from too much happiness, that she needed a balanced life with down days and miseries to keep the sharp edge on her work. But the idea that an artist needed to suffer to do her best work was a conceit of the young and inexperienced. The happier she grew, the better she wrote.

What has been is no more. Change has come.

Anyway, in those years, I was happy, as to one extent or another I have always been happy. The forest was not a wilderness to me, but served instead as my private garden, comforting in spite of its vastness, and endlessly mysterious.The more familiar a place becomes, the more mysterious it becomes, as well, if you are alert to the truth of things. I have found this to be the case all of my life.

I don't know if this deception qualified as a half-step down the slippery slope. I had no sensation of sliding. But of course we never notice the descent until we're rocketing along at high velocity.

He wondered why it was easier to believe in a malevolent spirit than in a benign one. Sometimes it seemed that the human heart, this side of Eden, feared eternal life more than death, light more than darkness, freedom more than surrender.

I'd always had an ear for beauty, and maybe I'd had an eye for it as well, but until that day, I'd not recognized that the truth in great music could be found also in great art, that the heart could be lifted and the mind sharpened equally by both.

One of the greatest gifts we receive from dogs is the tenderness they evoke in us. The disappointments of life, the injustices, the battering events that are beyond our control, and the betrayals we endure, from those we befriended and loved, can make us cynical and turn our hearts into flint – on which only the matches of anger and bitterness can be struck into flame. By their delight in being with us, the reliable sunniness of their disposition, the joy they bring to playtime, the curiosity with which they embrace each new experience, dogs can melt cynicism,and sweeten the bitter heart.

I'm small, I'm young - and I'm so different. You've always respected that difference, and you've always trusted it. Trust me now. There's a reason I am the way I am, and there's a reason I was born to you. There's always a reason. We belong together.

She said...she said don't be scared, we wasn't born to be all the time scared, we was born happy, babies laugh at everything, we was born happy and to make a better world.

Once, there were no predators, no prey. Only harmony. There were no quakes, no storms, everything in balance. In the beginning, time was all at once and forever — no past, present, and future, no death. We broke it all.

Either the gates of hell had opened, or Tom had lost his mind; for there could be nothing like this entity outside the precincts of the damned, except in the fevered fantasies of a raving paranoid psychopath

Life had been hard on this girl, Jacob, but she had enough courage for an army.

I had not asked to be born. Only to be loved.

You do what you have to do. That's who you seem to be to me, anyway. You're one who does what he has to do.

People who go to work every day, make sacrifices to raise families, and get through life without hurting other people if they can help it-those are the real heros.

Duty is a good thing, a calling without which no civilization can survive, but it is also a weight and chain that sometimes seems sure to sink you to the airless bottom of a dark pool

A high degree of intelligence yes in no other creature in the natural world. That's why nature shuns us and why we subconsciously hate her and seek to obliterate her. High intelligence leads to the concept of progress. Progress leads to nuclear weapons, bio-engineering chaos and ultimately to annihilation.

The world needed a little Evil, so Good had something to compare itself to, but you couldn't let it think it had the right-of-way on the road and an invitation to dinner.

Home was not a perfect place. But it was the only home they had and they could hope to make it better.

Some people misunderstand evil and believe it will relent, and because their misplaced hope inspires dark hearts to dream darker dreams, they are the fathers and mothers of all wars. Evil does not relent; it must be defeated. And even when defeated, uprooted, and purified by fire, evil leaves behind a seed that will one day germinate and, in blooming, again be misunderstood.

On a small table beside his chair were other haphazardly stacked volumes by such poets as Emerson, Whitman, and Wallace Stevens, a dangerous crew to let into your head.

...he looked as if nothing hard in the world had touched him...

People hide truths about themselves from themselves. Such self-deception is a coping mechanism, and to one extent or another, most people begin deceiving themselves when they're children.

In all our lives, however, there are many days when we die a little, when we are wounded by loss or failure, or by fear, or by seeing the suffering of others for whom we are able to offer only pity, for whom we are powerless to offer aid, we are beyond mercy.

Whatever happens here, trust your heart. It's as true as any compass.

Free will," she agreed, "our greatest gift, the thing that makes life worth living, in spite of all the anguish it brings.

Nothing supernatural has ever harmed me. My wounds and losses have all be at the hands of human beings...

As a writer, Bibi, you could be a doctor of the soul.

Her stare was direct and unwavering, full of confidence earned from painful experience...

May I tell you a wonderful truth about your dog? ... You have been given stewardship of what you in your faith might call a holy soul.

Terror and pleasure are linked in us. We are a baldly miswired species, Martie. Terror delights us, both the experience of terror and the dealing out of it to others. We are healthier if we admit to this miswiring and do not struggle to be better than our natures allow.

From all these friends, I could not escape learning some of the statistics that I preferred not to know. Forty-one people at the mall had been wounded. Nineteen had died. Everyone said it was a miracle that only nineteen perished. What has gone wrong with our world when nineteen dead can seem like any kind of miracle?

Hope, love and faith are in the waiting.

For the likes of you, the path to happiness is one mean son of a bitch of a path.

All death matters.""Only to the living.

Pain can be endured and defeated only if it is embraced. Denied or feared, it grows in perception if not in reality. The best response to terror is righteous anger, confidence in ultimate justice, a refusal to be intimidated.

It's so damn hard to bloom... to change. Even when you want to change, want it more than anything in the world, it's hard. Desire to change isn't enough. Or desperation. Couldn't be done without...love,

Evil was coming. I wondered whose face it would be wearing.

Fire, ice, asteroids and pole shifts are bogeymen with which we distract ourselves from the real threat of our time. In an age when everyone invents his own truth, there is no community, only factions. Without community, there can be no consensus to resist the greedy, the envious, the power-mad narcissists who seize control and turn the institutions of civilization into a series of doom machines.

When we make our own misery we sometimes cling to it even when we want so bad to change, because misery is something we know. The misery is comfortable.

Remember, there are cookies waiting here for you.

The truth was stranger than the official fiction.

There's no tragedy in nature, only process -- and therefore no triumph, either.

Evil travels the world in anonymity, its presence revealed only by the periodic consequences of its desires...

But the line between moral behavior and narcissistic self-righteousness is thin and difficult to discern

Then the clarifying thing happens, and what you need to do, what you must do, is not a question, not demand more revelation than what is given, be quiet in the face of it, quiet and grateful that it has been given to you to see this, to be for even a short time aware of the extraordinary layered depths and profound beauty of the world to which we mostly blind ourselves.

Human beings not only can't bear too much reality, we flee from reality when someone doesn't force us close enough to the fire to feel the heat on our faces.

..the most identifying trait of humanity is our ability to be inhumane to one another.

This time I would choose to err on the side of illogic. I had to trust intuition, and plunge as I had never plunged before, with blind faith.

In twenty-one years, I have not considered changing to Todd. The bizarre course of my life suggests that Odd is more suited to me, whether it was conferred by my parents with intention or fate.

I don't desire a change of scenery or exotic experiences. My heart yearns for familiarity, stability, the comfort of home- and my sanity depends on it.

He considered razing the house and rebuilding, but he realized that houses are not haunted, and regardless of the architecture with which we surround ourselves,our ghosts stay with us until we ourselves are ghosts.

Odd: I wish I could believe in reincarnation.Chief Porter: Not me. Once down the track is enough of a test. Pass me or fail me, Dear Lord, but don't make me go through high school again.Odd: If there's something we want so bad in this life but we can't have it, maybe we could get it the next time around.Chief Porter: Or maybe not getting it, accepting less without bitterness and being grateful for what we have is a part of what we're here to learn.

he knew that fate was only a mythological concept

More likely, they would just cease to exist.""That's death.""No, it's different. Death leaves a corps.