John Connolly Quotes & Sayings

Samuel understood at last why this being hated men and women so much: he hated them because they were so like himself, because the worst of the was mirrored in them. He was the source of all that was bad in men and women, but he had none of the greatness, and none of the grace, of which human beings were capable, so that by only by corrupting them was his own pain diminished, and thus his existence made more tolerable. — John Connolly

I met Hamlet at a number 48B bus stop," said Mr. Gedeon. "He'd been there for some time, poor chap. At least eight buses had passed him by, and he hadn't taken any of them. It's to be expected, I suppose. It's in his nature. — John Connolly

But there were some who went with her willingly, for there are other women who dream of lying with wolves. — John Connolly

The worst thing you can do as a writer is waste people's time. — John Connolly

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. — John Connolly

There are places where years have no meaning, where only a hair's breadth of history separates the present from the past. Standing there on that bleak hillside, a young man in a place where other young men had died, it was possible to feel a connection to that past, a sense that in some place further back on the the stream of time these young men were still fighting, and still dying, that they would always be fighting this battle, in this place, over and over again, with ever the same end. — John Connolly

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. — John Connolly

My grandfather used to say that if God did not allow a man to be reunited with his dogs in the next life He was no God worth worshipping; that if a dog did not have a soul, then nothing had. — John Connolly

gazing upon him with eyes that were too old for her face. — John Connolly

Story!" The dwarf snorted. "You'll be talking about "happily ever after" next. Do we look happy? There's no happily ever after for us. Miserabily ever after, more like. — John Connolly

This," said Angel to Louis, "is the best fucking idea anyone ever had since, like, Columbus bought a boat." The two men, along with Parker, were sitting — John Connolly

Wanted to talk to them. I wanted to tell them that I was sorry. I wanted to say what every child wishes to say to his parents when they're gone and it's too late to say anything at all: that I loved them, and had always loved them. — John Connolly

I used to think this was all about good and evil," said Rickett, "but it's not."
"No?"
"There's a kind of evil that isn't even in opposition to good, because good is an irrelevance to it. It's a foulness that's right at the heart of existence, born with the stuff of the universe. It's in the decay to which all things tend. It is, and it always will be, but in dying we leave it behind."
"And while we're alive?"
"We set our souls against it, and our saints and angels, too." He patted Parker on the shoulder. "Especially the destroying ones. — John Connolly

Why did you shoot him?"
"You weren't around," I replied, my teeth gritted in pain. "If you'd been here I'd have shot you instead. — John Connolly

Sometimes he would forget her, but in forgetting he would remember her again, and the ache for her would return with a vengeance. — John Connolly

After all, no relationship could function or survive under the burden of total honesty. — John Connolly

Anyone who wants bookstores to survive is portrayed as a Luddite who goes around smashing up Kindles. — John Connolly

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. — John Connolly

She laughed loudly. It sounded to her husband like someone pushing a witch in a barrel over a waterfall. He pictured his wife in a barrel falling into very deep water, and this cheered him up a bit. — John Connolly

There is a dark resource within all of us, a reservoir of hurt and pain and anger upon which we can draw when the need arises. Most of us rarely, if ever, have to delve too deeply into it. That is as it should be, because dipping into it costs and you lose a little of yourself each time, a small part of all that is good and honorable and decent about you. Each time you use it you have to go a little deeper, a little further down into the blackness. Strange creatures move through its depths, illuminated by a burning light from within and fueled only by the desire to survive and to kill. The danger in diving into that pool, in drinking from that dark water, is that one day you may submerge yourself so deeply that you can never find the surface again. Give in to it and you're lost forever. — John Connolly

A condensed Shakespeare with all of the dull parts removed, leaving only the great moments of drama: ghosts, and bloodied daggers, and dying kings. — John Connolly

We're the world's leading producer of serial killers. It's a sign of sickness, is what it is. We're sick and weak and these killers are like a cancer inside us: the faster we grow, the quicker they multiply. — John Connolly

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. — John Connolly

So, how we doin'?"
"Same as usual: dead people, a mystery, more dead people."
"Who we lost?"
"The boy. His guardians. Maybe Elliot Norton."
"Shit, don't sound like we got anybody left. Anyone hires you better leave you your fee in their will. — John Connolly

What's seldom is wonderful. — John Connolly

In the end, you have to let things go. The things you regret are the things you hold on to. — John Connolly

Sometimes, I think that I concerned myself so much with the possibility of their loss that I never truly took pleasure in the fact of their existence. — John Connolly

Funny, that. For so long Wormwood had desired the throne and then, when he'd had it, it hadn't been worth desiring after all. — John Connolly

Harlan was not a particularly religious man, and had always poured scorn on those whom he termed "God-botherers" - Christian, Jew, or Muslim, he had no time for any of them - but he was, in his way, a deeply spiritual being, worshipping a god whose name was whispered by leaves and praised in birdsong. He had been a warden with the Maine Forest Service for forty years, — John Connolly

I find that I take a great deal of pleasure knowing I get up people's noses to some degree. — John Connolly

He had found it hard to equate the priest's God with the one who had left his mother to die slowly and painfully. — John Connolly

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

It was imaginative people who tended to lie. Lying required making stuff up, and only imaginative people were good at that. — John Connolly

My God was like a parent always trying to watch out for His children, but you couldn't always be there for your children, no matter how hard you tried. I had not been there for Jennifer when she most needed — John Connolly

Before she became ill, David's mother would often tell him that stories were alive. They weren't alive in the way that people were alive, or even dogs or cats. People were alive whether you chose to notice them or not, while dogs tended to make you notice them if they decided that you weren't paying them enough attention. Cats, meanwhile, were very good at pretending people didn't exist at all when it suited them, but that was another matter entirely. — John Connolly

When I started in homicide, the Dead Sea was just sick. — John Connolly

Unless you know the code, it has no meaning. — John Connolly

Good will attract good to itself, and those involved will unite toward a common goal. Evil, in turn, draws evil men, but they will never truly act as one. They will always be distrustful, always jealous. Ultimately, they seek power for themselves alone, and for that reason they will always fall apart at the end. — John Connolly

Because a man who is everybody's friend really has no friends at all. — John Connolly

I am sorry," I whispered. "I am sorry for all of the ways that I failed you. I am sorry that I was not there to save you, or to die alongside you. I am sorry that I have kept you with me for so long, trapped in my heart, bound in sorrow and remorse. I forgive you too. I forgive you for leaving me, and I forgive you for returning. I forgive you your anger, and your grief. Let this be an end to it. — John Connolly

All great art commences with a vision, and perhaps it may be that the vision is closer to God than that which is ultimately created by the artist's brush. There will always be human flaws in the execution. Only in the mind can the artist achieve true perfection. — John Connolly

She might suspect it, but I haven't met a mother yet who'd admit her child was out where the buses don't run, not without a fight." "But Mother must have signed off on Vincent Garronne — John Connolly

This was a fundamentally changed man, one who had come back strengthened, not weakened, by what he had endured, but who was also both less and more than he once had been. For — John Connolly

You have to understand that only the very worst end up here: the ones whose anger made them kill, and who felt no sorrow or guilt after the act; those so obsessed with themselves that they turned their backs on the sufferings of others, and left them in pain; those whose greed meant that others starved and died. Such souls belong here, because they would find no peace elsewhere. In this place, they are understood. In this place, their faults have meaning. In this place, they belong. — John Connolly

Warraner looked pleasantly surprised at the question, like a Mormon who had suddenly found himself invited into a house for coffee, cake, and a discussion of the wit and wisdom of Joseph Smith. — John Connolly

A discarded newspaper skimmed the sidewalk with a sound like the whisperings of a dead lover. — John Connolly

The evolutionary curve obviously sloped pretty gently where Six came from. — John Connolly

In general it's a good idea to avoid people who take themselves too seriously. As individuals, we have only so much seriousness to go round, and people who take themselves very seriously don't have enough seriousness left over to take other people seriously. Instead they tend to look down on them, and are secretly pleased when they get stuff wrong, because they just prove to the too-serious types that they were right not to take them too seriously to begin with. — John Connolly

Although it was cold out, he opened the window slightly because the room smelled of sleep. The action dislodged something red and black from the frame, — John Connolly

It was an overcast late November morning, the grass splintered by hoarfrost, and winter grinning through the gaps in the clouds like a bad clown peering through the curtains before the show begins. — John Connolly

He was in his mid-thirties, tall and pale and thin, with long, sandy hair and rimless glasses, dressed in brown polyester pants, cheap brown shoes, and a light tan shirt. He looked like someone had put a wig on a giraffe and run it through the local Target. — John Connolly

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. — John Connolly

There is sometimes a feeling in crime fiction that good writing gets in the way of story. I have never felt that way. All you have is language. Why write beneath yourself? It's an act of respect for the reader as much as yourself. — John Connolly

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. — John Connolly

God would even have forgiven Judas Iscariot, had he asked for His forgiveness. Judas wasn't damned for betraying Christ. He was damned for despairing, for rejecting the possibility that he might be forgiven for what he had done. — John Connolly

Law and justice are not the same. — John Connolly

She had not given me the cross to keep the bad men away, as a child might have been expected to do. No, in her mind the bad men could not be kept away. They were coming, and they would have to be faced. — John Connolly

although his physician had advised him not to be overly concerned about forgetting facts and names, and he should begin to worry only if he stopped noticing that he couldn't remember them - if, in essence, he forgot that he was forgetting. — John Connolly

It was the kind of bar where everybody knew your name, as long as your name was 'Motherfucker'. — John Connolly

His figures should have been through the roof; the economy was still unsteady, the president was hog-tied by his own compromised idealism, and Davis and his kind had succeeded in vilifying unions, immigrants, and welfare cases, making them carry the can for the greed of bankers and Wall Street sharks, thereby somehow convincing sane people that the poorest and weakest in the nation were responsible for most of its ills. What never ceased to amaze Tate was that many of those same individuals (the dirt-poor, the unemployed, the welfare recipients) listened to his show, even as he castigated those (the union organizers, the bleeding-heart liberals) who most wanted to help them. — John Connolly

In the old house, the past hung in the air like motes of dust waiting to be illuminated by the sharp rays of memory — John Connolly

Love covers a multitude of sins. — John Connolly

You don't have much faith in people, do you?' asked David. 'I don't have much faith in anything,' Roland replied. 'Not even in myself. — John Connolly

Astronomers who were recently sifting through thousands of signals from Sagittarius B2, a big dust cloud at the center of our galaxy, found a substance there called ethyl formate, which is the chemical responsible for the flavor of raspberries, and the smell of rum, the drink popular with pirates. Therefore, our galaxy tastes a bit of raspberries and smells of rum, which is nice. — John Connolly

What have you taken from me, and from what have you taken me? — John Connolly

He was just a boy wearing pajamas, one slipper, and an old blue dressing gown under a stranger's jacket, and he did not belong anywhere but in his own bedroom. — John Connolly

Daddy
and it contained within it the prospect of living and the hope of dying, of endings and beginnings, of love and loss and peace and rage, all wrapped up in two whispered syllables. — John Connolly

think you just like tethering goats." "Well, be sure to tell me when your rope begins — John Connolly

Newspaper stories were like newly caught fish, worthy of attention only for as long as they remained fresh, which was not very long at all. They — John Connolly

A technician who uses the term "glitch" is like a
Doctor who tells you you're suffering from a "thingy," except the doctor won't tell you to go home and try turning yourself on and off again. — John Connolly

When did you get so clever?"
"When I realized I wasn't as clever as I thought. — John Connolly

In the space of one night, [I] had gone through the possessions of my dead wife and child, sorting, discarding, smelling the last traces of them that clung to their clothing like the ghosts of themselves. — John Connolly

But no one on either side ever forgot that the law was white. Justice might be blind, but the law wasn't. Justice was aspirational, but the law was actual. The law was real. It had uniforms, and weapons. It smelt of sweat and tobacco. It drove a big car with a star on the door. White people had justice. Black folks had the law. — 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. — John Connolly

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

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. — John Connolly

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. — John Connolly

You must be careful where you step.
And you must be ready for what you might find. — John Connolly

You had to be reasonably wealthy and privileged to choose not to own stuff. He — John Connolly

They were the clothes of a child, and he was a child no longer. — John Connolly

You had evil inside you, and you indulged it. Men will always indulge it. — John Connolly

You can't prove that something doesn't exist. You can only prove that something does exist. — John Connolly

Wickedness never rests easily so, in a way, one might almost feel pity for the wicked, for they are destined to live their lives in fear, in a prison of the heart. — John Connolly

He was a locked box inside which tempests roiled. He was a man enshadowed by himself. — John Connolly

David tried to give a form to the beast at the heart of the poem but found that he could not. It was more difficult than it appeared, for nothing quite seemed to fit. Instead, he could only conjure up a half-formed being that crouched in the cobwebbed corners of his imagination where all the things that he feared curled and slithered upon one another in the darkness. — John Connolly

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 — John Connolly

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. — John Connolly

There is a price to be paid for everything, and it is a good idea to find out that price before you make the agreement. — John Connolly

He thought of the old commonplace about how giving up vices didn't make you live longer, but just made it feel as though you were living longer. — John Connolly

He was trying to put loss into words, but loss is absence and will always defy expression. — John Connolly

He would envy each and every living thing its freedom, even if it was only the freedom to die. — John Connolly

If he has a weakness, it's that he's a moral being. Where possible, he'll do the right thing, the just thing, and if he does wrong he'll bear the guilt of it. — John Connolly

I'm a ghost," said the small figure, then added, a little uncertainly, "Boo? — John Connolly

Parker felt, not for the first time, as though he had wandered into a ghost story. — John Connolly

And David saw himself reflected in the Woodsman's eyes, and there he was no longer old but a young man, for a man is always his father's child no matter how old he is or how long they have been apart. — John Connolly

Before she came ill, David's mother would often tell him that stories were alive. They weren't alive in the way that people were alive, or even dogs or cats. ( ... ) Stories were different, though: they came alive in the telling. Without a human voice to read them aloud, or a pair of wide eyes following them by torch light beneath a blanket, they had no real existence in our world. ( ... ) 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, David's mother would whisper. They needed it. It was the reason they forced themselves from their world into ours. They wanted us to give them life. — John Connolly

Real life was curious enough without the embellishments of fiction. — John Connolly

Being scared isn't the problem. It's not running away that's the hard part. — John Connolly

You mean they killed her?" asked David.
They ate her," said Brother Number One. "With porridge. That's what 'ran away and was never seen again' means in these parts. It means 'eaten.'"
Um and what about 'happily ever after'?" asked David, a little uncertainly. "What does that mean?"
Eaten quickly," said Brother Number One. — John Connolly

That evening, as he got ready for bed, he heard his mother and father talking in their bedroom, and that was how he learned that Billy had been naked when he was discovered and that the police had arrested a man who lived with his mother in a clean little house not far from where the body was found. David knew from the way they were talking that something very bad had happened to Billy before he died, something to do with the man from the clean little house.
...
Now, in another bedroom, he thought of Jonathan Tulvey and Anna, and wondered if a man from a clean little house, a man who lived with his mother and kept sweets in his pockets, had made them go down with him to the railroad tracks.
And there, in the darkness, he had played with them, in his way. — John Connolly