Koontz Quotes & Sayings

Say, Sometimes I think there may be more truth in fiction than in real life. Or at least truth condensed so that it's more easily understood. But what do I know of real people or the world, considering my strange existence? — Dean Koontz

An elaborately jointed array of bones landed in my lap, spasming like a broken crab. My cry was every bit as manly as that of a young schoolgirl surprised by a hairy spider. I knocked the thing off me, onto the floor. It — Dean Koontz

You must never lie to yourself, or you are left with no one to trust. — Dean Koontz

The singing wasn't the hopscotch-jumprope-happy kind. This was the kind of singing that, if you tracked it to its source, you might find a little girl in a moldy old burial dress, her skin pitted & green, with lots of coffin splinters & dirt between her teeth ...
... like a mermaid luring idiot sailors ... Winny wasn't a sailor, & he wasn't old enough to get all sexed up by some hot siren. — Dean Koontz

The stakes were suddenly so high that we wanted out of the game. When you're playing poker with the devil, however, no one leaves the table before he does. — Dean Koontz

In nightmares, we can't look into our own eyes except by indirection, perhaps because we fear discovering that therein lie the worst monsters plaguing us. — Dean Koontz

I warned myself against the danger of compassion in this case. How easy it would be to imagine the traumas of childhood that might have deformed her into the moral monster she had become, and then to convince myself that those traumas could be balanced - and their effects reversed - by sufficient acts of kindness. — Dean Koontz

What most people call truth is merely the surface, and under it lies a great depth of truth that they do not perceive. — Dean Koontz

The depth of your wardrobe dazzles the mind. Ralph Lauren weeps. — Dean Koontz

Are human reactions what they've always been, or has a century or more of movies influenced our response to every stimulus — Dean Koontz

The only thing we can't buy more of is time." she said.
"And dodo birds. We can't buy any more of them. they're extinct. And dinosaurs. — Dean Koontz

He's my father, whoever he is, so he must have had sex with my mother at least once, and I'd love to kill him for that. — Dean Koontz

Death came, Death went, but Commerce flowed Eternal. — Dean Koontz

I admit to having an imagination feverish enough to melt good judgment. — Dean Koontz

Of course, in the process, you must never do harm to others in any serious way, or you'll cease to amuse Him. Then payment comes due for promises you didn't keep. — Dean Koontz

Child, do you know where trult great courage comes from, the kind of courage that will never back down?'
I said, "Faith."
"And love," she said. "faith is a kind of love you know. Love of what is unseen but certain. Love makes us strong and brave. — Dean Koontz

Nowhere can a secret keep
Always secret, dark and deep,
Half so well as in the past,
Buried deep to last, to last.
Keep it in your own dark heart.
Otherwise the rumors start.
After many years have buried
Secrets over which you worried,
No confidant can then betray
All the words you didn't say.
Only you can then exhume
Secrets safe within the tomb
Of memory, of memory,
Within the tomb of memory.
-The Book of Counted Sorrows — Dean Koontz

what might have looked like courage proved to be a deficit of common sense and an excess of self-importance, too strong a faith in his genius and superiority - not courage at all, but the rash actions of an ordinary narcissist incapable of imagining that he might fail. — Dean Koontz

The dead can be even more frustrating to deal with than are many of the living, which is astonishing when you consider it's the living who run the Department of Motor Vehicles. — Dean Koontz

... Any talent - whether to write songs or to write novels...came with the obligation to use it to the fullest of one's ability, with a fierce commitment barely distinguishable from neurotic obsession. ... In fact...commitment to the point of obsession wasn't merely an obligation but a necessity... — Dean Koontz

The given world dazzles with wonder, poetry, and purpose. The man-made world, on the other hand, is a perverse realm of ego and envy, where power-mad cynics make false idols of themselves and where the meek have no inheritance because they have gladly surrendered it to their idols in return not for lasting glory but for an occasional parade, not for bread but for the promise of bread. — Dean Koontz

They say that necessity is the mother of invention, but it is also the grandmother of desperation. — Dean Koontz

The dog looked nothing like the lonely mongrel in her stories. The bedraggled golden retriever halted where the bungalow walkway met the public sidewalk. Girl and beast regarded each other. She called to him, "Here, boy, here." He needed to be coaxed, but eventually he approached the porch and climbed the steps. Bibi stooped to his level to peer into his eyes, which were as golden as his coat. "You stink." The retriever yawned, as if his stinkiness was old news to him. He — Dean Koontz

I sure hope she's wrong, because one of the implications of her cosmology is that the many terrors we know here are an inoculation against worse in the world to come. — Dean Koontz

I'd had much practice turning my mind away from certain memories of my childhood. I could quickly dial her remembered voice from a whisper to a silence. — Dean Koontz

We are all the walking wounded in a world that is a war zone. Everything we love will be taken from us, everything, last of all life itself. Yet everywhere I look, I find great beauty in this battlefield, and grace and the promise of joy. — Dean Koontz

Nature frequently works to impress upon us our absurdity and thereby remind us that we are not the masters of the universe that we like to suppose we are. — Dean Koontz

I guess with artificial intelligence, just like with natural intelligence, there can be a way-creepy side. — Dean Koontz

Always questioning your motivations is a healthy thing, but fearing your capacity for doing the wrong thing so that you retreat from many aspects of life is a terrible error in itself. — Dean Koontz

As I turned to leave the tent, she said, "Don't worry. Your own mother wouldn't know you."
I said, "She never has. — Dean Koontz

There's no tragedy in nature, only process
and therefore no triumph, either. — Dean Koontz

I realized that loving people, depending on them, NEEDING them, is just too dangerous. Love is just a way to set you up for a bad fall. It's the rug they pull out from under you at the very moment you decide that everything's going to be fine. We're all so ephemeral. So fragile. And life's so unpredictable. — Dean Koontz

I am wary of any gun, anywhere, anytime - except when it's in Stormy's hand. She could sit with her finger on the detonation button of a nuclear weapon, and I would feel safe enough to nap. — Dean Koontz

ravaged kidney; but, God willing, she would be able to enjoy a full life with the one that remained. — Dean Koontz

We not-much-of-anything types don't worry about the cost of leaving a light on unnecessarily. — Dean Koontz

Daily I walk a high wire, always in danger of losing my balance. The essence of my life is supernatural, which I must respect if I am to make the best use of my gift. Yet I live in the rational world and am subject to its laws. The temptation is to be guided entirely by impulses of an otherworldly origin-but in this world a long fall will always end in a hard impact. — Dean Koontz

We get only one life. We shouldn't waste a day of it in anger. — Dean Koontz

But victimhood was seductive, a release from responsibility and caring. Fear would be transmuted into weary resignation; failure would no longer generate guilt but, instead, would spawn a comforting self-pity. — Dean Koontz

When I am battered and oppressed by the world that humanity has made - which is difference from the world that is was given - my primary defense, my consolation, is the absurdity of that world — Dean Koontz

We have all been brought into the world for some reason, and we must wonder why and hope to learn. — Dean Koontz

Because wherever else the future leads, it leads ultimately to death, the end that is present in my beginning and in yours. — Dean Koontz

Each reader needs to bring his or her own mind and heart to the text. — Dean Koontz

That's life. Always something, more good than bad, but always interesting if you're paying attention. — Dean Koontz

On the other hand, dogs eat with gusto, play with exuberance, work happily when given the opportunity, surrender themselves to the wonder and the mystery of their world, and love extravagantly. — Dean Koontz

journeying through the fields of evil is the price we pay for free will, — Dean Koontz

She understood at least as well as I did what corruption and pitiless cruelty might be hidden behind the masks that some people wore. - Addison Goodheart pg 93 — Dean Koontz

Annamaria insists that mere hours earlier, I saved entire cities, sparing many hundreds of thousands from nuclear terrorism. Even if that is most likely true, I feel as though, in the process, I have forfeited a piece of my soul. — Dean Koontz

Acting is a marvelous profession ... If you can spend enough time playing other people, you don't have to think too much about your own character and motivations. — Dean Koontz

Keep busy, Granny Sugars used to say, even if with poker, fighting, and fast cars, because idleness will get you in worse trouble. — Dean Koontz

Human beings are such knotted, desperate pieces of work-it's a rare thing to know one completely, to the core, and still love him. — Dean Koontz

Instinct is an animal faculty, independent of instruction and reasoning, but far inferior to intuition, which is a grace unique to humanity. — Dean Koontz

Strangely enough, for many many years I didn't talk about my childhood and then when I did I got a ton of mail - literally within a year I got a couple of thousand letters from people who'd had a worse childhood, a similar childhood, a less-bad childhood, and the question that was most often posed to me in those letters was: how did you get past the trauma of being raised by a violent alcoholic? — Dean Koontz

Sometimes your life rolls away with you, like a big stone going downhill fast, — Dean Koontz

When she had delight in her heart, her face transcended all her suffering, whereupon the scars and the deformed features and the mottled skin became the remarkable face of a hero and the cherished face of a friend. — Dean Koontz

Living in the modern age, death for virtue is the wage. So it seems in darker hours. Evil wins, kindness cowers. Ruled by violence and vice we all stand upon thin ice. Are we brave or are we mice, here upon such thin, thin ice? Dare we linger, dare we skate? Dare we laugh or celebrate, knowing we may strain the ice? Preserve the ice at any price? — Dean Koontz

the more infantile the students, the more seriously they take themselves. They are generally a humorless lot." In — Dean Koontz

Quick now, here, now, always, if we are in a condition of complete simplicity (as the poet said), hope and trust will more reliably keep a man afloat, while fear is more likely to sink him. — Dean Koontz

I had not asked to be born. Only to be loved. — Dean Koontz

It's not just that," Chief Porter said. "A guy who once would have raped and killed a woman, now a lot of times he also has to cut off her lips and mail them to us or take her eyes for a souvenir and keep them in his freezer at home. There's more flamboyant craziness these days." Giving the buttered cinnamon roll a reprieve, Ozzie said, "Maybe it's all these superhero movies with all their supervillains. Some psychopath who used to be satisfied raping and murdering, these days he thinks that he should be in a Batman movie, he wants to be the Joker or the Penguin." "No real-life bad guy wants to be the Penguin," I assured him. "Norman Bates was happy just dressing up like his mother and stabbing people," Chief Porter said, "but Hannibal Lecter has to cut off their faces and eat their livers with fava beans. The role models have become more intense. — Dean Koontz

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

pity very often - not always - comes with an unspoken and sometimes unrecognized element of contempt. — Dean Koontz

Beyond the slumpstone wall lay a backyard, a swimming pool. Dappled with morning light and tree shadows, the water glimmered in shades of blue from sapphire to turquoise, as might a trove of jewels left by long-dead pirates who had sailed a sea since vanished. — Dean Koontz

But with one exception, all things pass from this world and time erases not just memories but entire civilizations, reducing everyone and every monument to dust. The only thing that survives is love, for it is an energy as enduring as light, which travels outward from its source toward the ever-expanding boundaries of the universe, the very energy of which all things were conceived and with which all things will be sustained in a world beyond this world of time and dust and forgetting. — Dean Koontz

Everyone thinks his family is strange," Del said, scratching Scootie behind the ears, "but it's just that ... because we're closer to the people we love, we tend to see them through a magnifying glass, through a thicker lens of emotion, and we exaggerate their eccentricities. — Dean Koontz

Oleander will kill you quickly. Azaleas, ingested, take a few hours. Vomiting, paralysis, seizures, coma, death. Then there's savin, henbane, foxglove, jimsonweed ... all here in Pico Mundo."
"And we call her Mother Nature."
"There's nothing fatherly about time and what it does to us, either," Ozzie said. — Dean Koontz

I can do what I need to do. I can get where I want to go, no matter how hard it is. — Dean Koontz

Every human cell, with its thousands of protein chains, is more complex than a 747 or the largest cruise ship, in fact more complex than the two combined. All life on Earth, in its extravagant variety, offers itself for study, but though we probe to ever deeper layers of its structure, the meaning eludes us. — Dean Koontz

Being alone can be good. It is easy to find peace alone. But sometimes...being alone is a kind of death. — Dean Koontz

That is, Jack thought, the way of life. The horror changes us, because we can never forget. Cursed with memory. It starts when we're old enough to know what death is and realize that sooner or later we'll lose everyone we love. We're never the same. But somehow we're all right. We go on. — Dean Koontz

That's life. Something always happens. We don't live in stasis, frozen in amber. — Dean Koontz

Nothing I could say or do would help her. Life is hard in a world gone wrong. — Dean Koontz

I didn't tell her that death lies dormant in each of us and will bloom in time. — Dean Koontz

When I function in only one mode or the other, I am denying half myself, half my potential. — Dean Koontz

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. — Dean Koontz

She'd known that being a victim was often a choice people made. — Dean Koontz

Dogs invite us not only to share their joy but also to live in the moment, where we are neither proceeding from nor moving toward, where the enchantment of the past and future cannot distract us, where a freedom from practical desire and a cessation of our usual ceaseless action allows us to recognize the truth of our existence, the reality of our world and purpose-if we dare. — Dean Koontz

I must exist in shadows, while you live under exquisitely blue skies, and yet I don't hate you for the freedom that you take for granted-although I do envy you.
I don't hate you because, after all, you are human, too, and therefore have limitations of your own. Perhaps you are homely, slow-witted or too smart for your own good, deaf or mute or blind, by nature given to despair or to self-hatred, or perhaps you are unusually fearful of Death himself. We all have burdens. On the other hand, if you are better-looking and smarter than I am, blessed with five sharp senses, even more optimistic than I am, with plenty of self-esteem, and if you also share my refusal to be humbled by the Reaper ... well, then I could almost hate you if I didn't know that, like all of us in this imperfect world, you also have a haunted heart and a mind troubled by grief, by loss, by longing. — Dean Koontz

In an infinite universe, anything that could be imagined might somewhere exist. — Dean Koontz

Between birth and burial, we find ourselves in a comedy of mysteries. If you don't think life is mysterious, if you believe you have it all mapped out, you aren't paying attention or you've anesthetized yourself with booze or drugs, or with a comforting ideology. And if you don't think life's a comedy - well, friend, you might as well hurry along to that burial. The rest of us need people with whom we can laugh. — Dean Koontz

Some big guys, they think struttin' the muscle will put your tail between your legs, but all they got is strut, they ain't got the guts to back up the brag — Dean Koontz

You've taught me that we're all needed, even those who sometimes think we're worthless, plain and dull. If we love and allow ourselves to be loved ... well, a person who loves is the most precious thing in the world, worth all the fortunes that ever were. That's what you've taught me, fur face,and because of you I'll never be the same. — Dean Koontz

What really holds their marriage together are mutual respect of an awesome depth, a shared sense of humor, faith that they were brought together by a force greater than themselves, and a love so unwavering and pure that it is sacred. — Dean Koontz

World is sensation. We drift in an ocean of sensory stimuli: motion, color, texture, shape, heat, cold, natural symphonies of sound, an infinite number of scents, tastes beyond the human ability to catalogue. Nothing but sensation endures. Living things all die. Great cities do not last. — Dean Koontz

Desperation is energized despair, and despair is the abandonment of hope. — Dean Koontz

The things we regret most in life are the things we don't do. — Dean Koontz

With time, however, life had become too real, — Dean Koontz

Understanding wasn't always necessary, as long as you believed. — Dean Koontz

This is reality, tofu man, because reality is what we carry in our hearts, and my heart is full of beauty just for you. — Dean Koontz

In the beginning was the word. Before all else, the word. So we speak as if words matter, because they do. — Dean Koontz

Years later, after other experiences with dogs, I wondered if their species were shaped and charmed to serve as four-legged guides able to assist in leading humanity back to our first - and lost - home. By the example of their joy and humility, by wanting nothing more than food and play and love, by the deep satisfaction that they take from those humble things, they belie all creeds of power and fame. Although they have the teeth to tear, it is by swish of tail and yearning eyes that they most easily get what they want. — Dean Koontz

Sometimes you have to break a rule to save the system. — Dean Koontz

By their subtle reversal of all images, mirrors seemed to be windows to another world in opposistion to this one, a world where everything appeared familiar but was infact profoundly different — Dean Koontz

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. — Dean Koontz

The world is full of people who are eager to diminish you, to shame you, to put you in your place and to keep you down. If you embrace humility too fully, you are doing the bastards' work for them. — Dean Koontz

Mankind has no right to employ its genius in the creation of another intelligent species, then treat it like property. If we've come so far that we can create as God creates, then we have to learn to act with the justice and mercy of God. — Dean Koontz

Is there some meaning to this life?
What purpose lies behind the strife?
Whence do we come, where are we bound?
These cold questions echo and resound
through each day, each lonely night.
We long to find the splendid light
that will cast a revelatory beam
upon the meaning of the human dream.
Courage, love, friendship,
compassion, and empathy
lift us above the simple beasts
and define humanity. — Dean Koontz

The past cannot be redeamed. What has been and what might have been both bring us to what is.
To know grief, we must be in the river of time, because grief thrives in the present and promises to be with us in the future until the end point. Only time conquers time and its burdens. There is no grief before or after time, which is all the consolation we should need. — Dean Koontz

For those who dispair that their lives are without meaning and without purpose, for those who dwell in a lonelines so terrible that it has withered their hearts, for those who hate because they have no recognition of the destiny they share with all humanity, for those who would squander their lives in self-pity and in self-destruction because they have lost the saving wisdom with which they are born, for all these and many more, hope waits in the dreams of a dog, where the scared bature of life may be clearly experienced without all but binding filter of human need, desire, greed, envy and endless fear. And here, in dream woods and fields, along with the shores of dream seas, with the profound awareness of the playful presence abiding in all things, Curtis is able to prove what she thus far only dared to hope is true: that although her mother never loved her, there is one who always has. — Dean Koontz

Anger is a violent emotion, vindictive, and as dangerous to he who is driven by it as to anyone on whom it is turned. — Dean Koontz

To one degree or another, I have been happy most of my life, in part because the world has infinite charms if you wish to see them. - Addison Goodheart pg. 119 — Dean Koontz