Dean Koontz Quotes

“The world howls for social justice, but when it comes to social responsibility, you sometimes can't even hear crickets chirping.”
― Dean Koontz, Deeply Odd

“All these girls swooning over hunky vampires, what they really want is to give away their freedom, to be controlled and told what to do and not have to think -- and never die, of course. It's sick is what it is. I don't want to be a forever-young living corpse.”
― Dean Koontz, What the Night Knows

“In memory, she lived and moved and laughed, but all that a photograph could offer was one frozen moment of a life.”
― Dean Koontz, Odd Apocalypse

“Holy men tell us life is a mystery.
They embrace that concept happily.
But some mysteries bite and bark
and come to get you in the dark.”
― Dean Koontz, Darkfall

“people have a natural tendency to anthropomorphize their pets, to ascribe human perceptions and intentions to the animal where none exist”
― Dean Koontz, Watchers

“In time, however, I came to understand that one can adore and desire that which is forever beyond reach. This might, in fact, be the hardest truth of human existence.”
― Dean Koontz, Demon Seed

“Be not so foolish as to cling to what was, rather than embrace what can be.”
― Dean Koontz, The Forest of Lost Souls

“She reads aloud from Eliot—“‘I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing’”—and then she closes the book and sets it aside.”
― Dean Koontz, The House at the End of the World

“Don’t waste a fine spring day, Jonah. There’s not as many of them in a lifetime as you think there will be.”
― Dean Koontz, The City

“Dawn breaks
And blossoms open
Gates of paradise.”
― Dean Koontz, The City

“He is so new to this life and his abilities that he still amazes himself.”
― Dean Koontz, After Death

“He has many uses for people who go through life inventing their own truth; once you know what fantasy they live in, they are easy to motivate and manipulate.”
― Dean Koontz, After Death

“He will be elevated out of this simulation into the higher realm of the gamemakers.”
― Dean Koontz, After Death

“For a coward, Aleem had a hard punch.”
― Dean Koontz, After Death

“War here, war there, crime everywhere, yet nobody cares about nothin’ but the Beatles and some guy who paints giant soup cans and sells them as art, this movie star, that movie star, blah-blah-blah. The world’s a nuthouse. It’s insane. It’s scary. It’s—”
“—those Bilderbergers,” I suggested.
“Ain’t truer words ever been spoken.”
― Dean Koontz, The City

“You think she’s pretty?”
“Well, sure, because she is.”
“Not to me she ain’t. Truly pretty’s more than looks. She’s got a hard, cold edge can’t never be pretty. A piece of work, that one.”
― Dean Koontz, The City

“Life isn’t as predictable as the movies. In life, deep and terrible secrets are usually revealed not when you’re searching for them, but when you least expect them and are unprepared.”
― Dean Koontz, The City

“Shadows did not flee, but merely retreated and regrouped and stood sentinel.”
― Dean Koontz, The City

“Music—good music, great music—is itself magical, its mysterious inspiration entwined with the mystery of all things. When we are transported either by Mozart or Glenn Miller, we find ourselves in the presence of the ineffable, for which all words are so inadequate that to attempt to describe it, even with effusive praise and words of perfect beauty, is to engage in blasphemy.”
― Dean Koontz, The City

“A girl’s got to know her competition if she’s to have a chance.”
― Dean Koontz, The Other Emily

“Life is so fragile and uncertain that every daybreak is a miracle, almost a triumph. That first blush in the sky is all the hope of the world distilled into light. I watch the dark fade, and say to myself, “Okay, I’m still here,” and the more sunrises I see, the more I feel as if I’ll live to see another twenty thousand.”
― Dean Koontz, The Other Emily

“Let’s never say ‘tomorrow,’ because all we ever have is the moment. People think there’s a future, but there really isn’t, not if we want to be totally honest with ourselves. There’s the past, which we might wish desperately that we can change, and there’s now. If we don’t seize the now with all our might, it becomes just another part of the past that we end up wishing we could change.”
― Dean Koontz, The Other Emily

“It doesn’t pay to be special in this world, Uncle. In fact, it’s dangerous.”
― Dean Koontz , The Forest of Lost Souls

“José hadn’t fallen in love with a woman capable of wallowing in self-pity and victimhood. Dignity is a consequence of perseverance, persistence, endurance. She intends to remain the woman he loved, and avoid all temptations to become someone else.”
― Dean Koontz

“Although he has no choice, he feels as if a small light inside of him has gone out. It’s not the first to have been extinguished, but maybe there aren’t a lot more of them still glowing.”
― Dean Koontz

“For some reason, though there is neither a steeple nor stained glass, the house reminds him of a church. He takes that impression seriously. He thinks it possible that ceremonies of innocence, the humble routines and kind sharing of daily existence that give life meaning, when performed often and for long enough, can confer on a house a hallowed quality. He’s known such homes; he has known their opposite, where human depravity has so soiled a structure that an aura of evil shadows every room even when all the lights are lit.”
― Dean Koontz, The Forest of Lost Souls

“There is strength in solidarity, but also in suffering and in struggle and in hope.”
― Dean Koontz, The Forest of Lost Souls

“Everything is more expensive than it once was.”
― Dean Koontz

“Most people regard the primeval forest as a threatening domain of wilderness trails that often lead bewildered hikers to their deaths, nests of poisonous snakes, dens of sharp-toothed predators—a realm where Nature is red of tooth and claw. To Vida, however, the forest is a place of solace and succor where she is welcome because she has knowledge of—and deep respect for—its ways. In her experience, it is civilization, riven by human arrogance and greed and envy, that is, at its worst, a forest of lost souls.”
― Dean Koontz, The Forest of Lost Souls

“He answers that they are one and the same, Emily and Maddison, and if they are not one and the same, nevertheless he loves them both. But that is not an adequate justification for such an error as the one of which he’s being accused. On the twelfth step, with only the landing ahead, the voice within his heart asks, “Is it not a betrayal of your Emily, yet another betrayal, to mistake Maddison for her, leave her among the dead, and embrace her imposter, all in the interest of your own happiness?””
― Dean Koontz, The Other Emily